Re: Clarification needed on ALT/TITLE tooltips

I imagine that IE was so integrated into Windows that it would have been pretty
hard to port to another OS, and trying to make it less Win32-dependant was part
of the reason it hasn't changed much in 2 years. But that's just a guess on my
part. I have heard good things about Tasman and its standard's compliance, and
it is never a bad thing to rewrite your layout engine. That's why Netscape
created Gecko within the Mozilla project. I hope that all versions of IE run
off of it eventually, and that someone at Microsoft cares about standards.

Once the architecture is done, though, it would make sense to try to make it as
portable as possible so you can get good code reuse on a cross-platform basis.
Of course, that is a non-issue since there will be no more standalone versions
of IE on Win32. Seems like a step backwards to me, but I imagine it allows them
to say IE is part of the operating system and avoid the antitrust actions
again.

The rest is offtopic: Microsoft isn't the only company that has anticompetitive
practices, and a monopoly of sorts. Its sad to say, but AOL/TW/(Disney?) has
become another.That's 4 names strung together, and they have zillions of
children companies like Netscape. At the same time, companies like Panasonic,
Pioneer, Sony, and Toshiba are what you could call Multiopolies where a few
companies control the industry. What I don't like is that even though these
companies claim to increase innovation, its competitiveness that increases
innovation. It seems to me that these companies are more interesting at
maximizing profits and innovating only when necessary. Pretty much all of their
innovations come from swallowing up new venture firms.

--- Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> On 6/26/03 6:57 AM, "Brian Bober" <netdemonz@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Isn't IE for Mac being canned, though?
> 
> My understanding of the announcements is that there will be no more major
> revisions to a stand-alone IE period (on any platform).
> 
> > I guess they will still continue to use
> > tasman for MSN?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > I'm not trying to brag, but Microsoft could learn a bit from Mozilla having
> > the same codebase on every platform.
> 
> It's not as black and white as you put it.  Having a separate codebase
> allowed Tasman to develop at much faster speed (than either IE/Windows or
> Mozilla), and thus IE5/Mac shipped in March of 2000, with standards support
> far ahead of any other browser (including Mozilla, whose NS6 release weeks
> later merely proved my point, since reviews universally panned NS6 in
> comparison to IE5/Mac), which was also confirmed in numerous reviews.
> 
> Also, IE6/Windows benefited from many of the innovations that Tasman was
> able to make since it was a separate code base that could attempt solving
> problems that were deemed risky or even impossible (e.g. fixing the box
> model, DOCTYPE switching etc.), solutions that were also copied by Mozilla
> (and other browsers) for that matter.
> 
> So there are advantages/disadvantages with either approach.
> 
> > --- Asbj?rn_Ulsberg <asbjorn.ulsberg@nrk.no> wrote:
> >> 
> >> Tantek ?elik wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Note that Internet Explorer for Macintosh behaves properly
> >>> in this regard since version 5 released in March of 2000,
> >>> that is, only displaying the 'title' attribute in tooltips,
> >>> and NOT displaying the 'alt' attribute in tooltips.
> >> 
> >> Ok. Nice to know. This points out the extreme stupidity of
> >> having two seperate developing teams working on IE for Mac
> >> and IE for Windows.
> 
> So you are saying it would have been less stupid to simply port IE for
> Windows to the Mac (which is what would have happened with only one team),
> and then have it also incorrectly display 'alt' attributes in tooltips
> rather than have it actually behave correctly?  Please recheck your logic.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Tantek
> 


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Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 16:46:10 UTC