Re: Netscape tags not HTML3.0 compatible

>The question is: will there ever really be a standard which all browsers
>follow?

"All browsers?"  Of course not.  Nobody's shooting for 100%.

Netscape is young and horny.  Its market, by and large, does not understand
what the possibilities are, does not understand what it's being denied by
choosing Netscape exclusively, and does not yet care to learn.  This is not
a sitation where one can reasonably expect technological maturity.

Eventually there will be something that everybody's happy with, yeah.  It
could conceivably require enough time and effort that the final product
looks nothing like the Web, but that's not the point.  Even hardware
manufacturers are finally coming around to the PPCP logic.

Real standardization won't happen until netscape has been discredited, just
like it took Microsoft's sustaining a decade-long (and un-acknowledged)
beating, from Unix on the power side and from Apple on the ease-of-use
side, before they realized that writing a portable OS was a good strategic
notion.  Their software still sucks, but they needed PPCP as much as PPCP
needed windows NT to compete.  The consumer wins, and everybody else
survives.  Netscape's future is similar.

Nobody's saying it's going to be easy - it took a multibillion-dollar
triumvirate before anybody other than mac users and the nine known amiga
diehards would consider an alternative to Intel's chips, for chrissake.
This conflict's lack of hardware's relative permanency is made up for, to
some extent, by Netscape's insufferable trendiness and wall street success.

When the first garage company releases a fast, stylish, style-sheets
capable browser at no cost _because_it_wants_the_goodwill_of_the_net_,
that's when the war starts.  In the meantime, most of the denizens of this
and similar lists can expect the kind of frustrations that, once upon a
time, were named after cassandra.

  -nat

--
Scheckie Irons/Whateverworks Consulting & Evangelism/irons@swell.hampshire.edu
"What about - what about - what about the bad Dan Rather?  What about the bad
- who's that guy - Mike Wallace?  Bad Bill Buckley!" - Ex-DCI William Casey

Received on Monday, 18 March 1996 13:02:17 UTC