- From: Einar Stefferud <Stef@nma.com>
- Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 23:01:57 -0700
- To: www-international@w3.org
Reading this stream of traffic is most disheartening;-)... The great problem to solve in this decade is that of Interworking at the Application Information Object Exchange level, and it is crystal clear that this is going to require Strong Typing, and Labeled Encodings on External Formats. That is, we must agree on what kinds of tags we will put on our bags of bits, in order to facilitate rendering by recipients. Any acceptance of "sniffing" as a legitimate way to detect content types, and determine what to do to render data, is just a big fat cop out. Blaming it on the standards bodies for being too weak to enforce their will against the vendors is totally bogus. The technology for strong typing has been around now since 1993, and is moving now to full standard. It is called MIME. It is there for the taking. it is deploying itself, with precious little help from most vendors. It is time to wake up, smell the coffee, and get to work. If the vendors and developers do not get with it, we only have to look forward to a long long spell of trouble with our attempts to work together. This can only diminish market growth and acceptance of our WEB and EMail products. In particular, it will inhibit i18n progress and global market growth. It is silly to fight over market turf when the fight only shrinks the total market so a few vendors get a bigger share of a much smaller market. What is the point of doing this. The right battle cry is: We Work Better With Everyone Than Anyone! I don't see much of that in this diucssion;-)...\Cheers...\Stef
Received on Friday, 21 June 1996 02:07:38 UTC