RE: Make Microsoft follow the spec.

You hardly need to inform ME of that - since I've been participating in Web
browser development for roughly eight years now, and have spent in ordinate
and expensive amounts of time figuring out how Netscape implemented weird
things in their browser in order to satisfy customers complaining that IE
didn't work on their page (and then getting blamed, e.g., for font
properties not inheriting through table cells, which was Netscape's design,
not ours - which really chafes my shorts).  That is, however, a fact of
life, and innovating features is a competitive sport on both sides as far as
I'm concerned.  If you want Web pages that are accessible from a variety of
devices, operating systems and browsers, then write to the standards; if a
content developer is happy to limit their market to use more powerful
features, then that's their business as far as I'm concerned.  Microsoft
still participates in the DOM Working Group (among other groups), and tries
to innovate in those bodies of work in what we feel are the right directions
for our customers.

This particular discussion started with the fact that IE supports
"document.all" - a collection of all the elements in a document exposed in
the object model.  I would point out that IE shipped support for this
collection in IE4 in September of 1997 - more than a year BEFORE DOM level 1
became a W3C Recommendation (only a week or two after the _Requirements_ for
DOM level 1 were published, in fact).  Indeed, the innovations in IE4 were
certainly partly responsible - at Microsoft's urging, I would point out -
for the formation of the DOM Working Group, and the eventual development of
the DOM specification.

If you think we are going to remove support of such widely-used object model
from our implementation, then you are deluding yourself.  Microsoft argued
long and hard in the DOM WG that the usefulness of document.all should not
be ignored; regardless, it was not incorporated into the standard. Mind you,
document.getElementById() does nearly the same thing - and we implemented
that, along with a lot of other duplicate object model functionality, to
provide standards support rather than just proprietary versions of the same
thing (despite having implemented our own functionality long before).

-Chris Wilson
PS - You should probably consider this diatribe to represent my personal
views, not Microsoft's.

-----Original Message-----
From: NeTDeMoN [mailto:NeTDeMoNZ@flashmail.com]
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 6:06 PM
To: www-html@w3.org
Subject: RE: Make Microsoft follow the spec.


Chris, I would have to say that in theory you are correct, but in practice
this is far from true. When the maker of the most popular browser has a tag
that people take advantage of but doesn't follow the standard, that makes
everyone else have to include that tag or face the wrath of people who are
used to writing pages for the most popular browser. Hence, when the standard
isn't followed, it causes inconsistancies in web pages and questions of "why
doesn't this work on you're browser too?" from less knowledgable people.

-----Original Message-----
From: www-html-request@w3.org [mailto:www-html-request@w3.org]On Behalf
Of Chris Wilson
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 14:26
To: 'bertilow@chello.se'; www-html@w3.org
Subject: RE: Make Microsoft follow the spec.


Claiming that support of non-standard (i.e., proprietary) object model makes
an implementation "non-standards-compliant" is incorrect.  It is proprietary
OM, but nothing the DOM claims exclusion of any other OM.

-Chris Wilson
 Program Manager
 Internet Explorer team

-----Original Message-----
From: Bertilo Wennergren [mailto:bertilow@hem.passagen.se]
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 11:04 AM
To: www-html@w3.org
Subject: RE: Make Microsoft follow the spec.


Bjoern Hoehrmann:

> * Bertilo Wennergren wrote:

> >> Other things that I can think of off the top of my head that don't work
> >> correctly [in Mozilla] is that document.all stuff IE has,

> >"document.all" works perfectly in Mozilla - i.e. it does _not_ work,
> >and that is the correct behaviour for at standards compliant browser.

> Why do you think so?

Because "document.all" is not part of the standard DOM. It's a proprietary
MSIE thing.

  <http://sites.netscape.net/ekrockhome/standards.html>

#####################################################################
                          Bertilo Wennergren
                  <http://purl.oclc.org/net/bertilo>
                         <bertilow@chello.se>
#####################################################################

Received on Tuesday, 27 February 2001 12:26:13 UTC