RE: Make Microsoft follow the spec.

Netscape shipped that "feature" in one major release, and EVEN WHEN THEY
SHIPPED IT, the CSS positioning specification - a standards-based effort,
rather than a proprietary solution - was far along in development, and they
were participating in this effort - Layers was a stillborn, and I expect
they knew it quite well.  Netscape simultaneously implemented the CSS
positioning draft - although their support was pretty buggy - and Layers, a
proprietary way of doing essentially the same thing (to really get the same
level of functionality, of course, you'd need IFRAME and DOM support, which
would have been difficult to implement in their 4.x architecture, I
suspect).

On the other hand, document.all has been shipped in three major IE releases
already (4.0, 5.0 and 5.5), and in 4.0 was the ONLY way, pretty much, of
accessing elements to make use of DHTML.  Almost every DHTML application
used document.all.  There is simply no way we would aggravate our customers
that much.  I think a number of people still feel that document.all is a
better solution - I don't, except that it's a short name that
document.getElementById() - and we did make a concerted good-faith effort to
have what we felt the best solution was in the standard.  We lost that
battle - okay, fine.  We implemented the standards-based solution, even told
people to use it rather than what we felt was the right solution.  Sorry,
but again, it's not our job to police the world, particularly at our own
expense.  People have built major software solutions on our DHTML platform -
we will drive forward with our implementation of standards, but not at
severe cost to our own customers.

-Chris Wilson
 Speaking, once again, for myself rather than Microsoft, just because I
don't feel like tempering my response.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Hickson [mailto:ian@hixie.ch]
Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2001 7:07 PM
To: www-html@w3.org
Subject: RE: Make Microsoft follow the spec.


On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Chris Wilson wrote:
>
> If you think we are going to remove support of such widely-used object
model
> from our implementation, then you are deluding yourself.

Just as a data point for this discussion I would like to point out that in
their last release, Netscape removed *their* widely used object model
(namely, document.layers) and related HTML extensions (<layer> et al).

Make of that what you will.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                     )\     _. - ._.)       fL
Netscape, Standards Compliance QA              /. `- '  (  `--'
+1 650 937 6593                                `- , ) -  > ) \
irc.mozilla.org:Hixie _________________________  (.' \) (.' -' __________

Received on Monday, 5 March 2001 13:26:51 UTC