Re: Behavior, scripts, CSS

From: Matthew Brealey <webmaster@richinstyle.com>
Date: Tue, Aug 8, 2000, 10:34 AM

>> In the real world, the best solution is not always the purest.
>
> Adopting the expedient 'solution' has proved time and again to cost
> billions in the long run

wow - i cannot believe that people actually still make this seriously flawed
argument.  unless you just got involved in this industry like um yesterday.

>- witness this in operating systems, in
> security problems across the board, and indeed on the web. No-one would
> argue that <font> was ever a good thing, but it was certainly expedient
> - the cost of this is still being counted now ($millions? $billions).

no one made you use all those expedient toys.

when people make this "expediency cost billions in the long run" argument,
they always

ALWAYS

discount any and all productivity, profits etc. gained by such expediency as
nonexistent.  plenty of things wouldn't even _exist_ if someone didn't take
the "expedient" route in order to make them happen.

hmmm... tag-soup scriptable HTML vs. strict static SGML anyone?

oh, anyone heard the term "first-mover advantage"?
  "first-mover" is just another way of saying "most expedient"

expediency is typically immediately cheaper purely in terms of time cost.

> I don't think anyone ever regretted doing things properly.

everyone in this industry likes to forget all too quickly the things that
were "properly designed" which failed miserably in the marketplace because
they were too slow, impractical, late to market, etc. etc.

do i even have to begin listing the dead technologies?

there's probably a website (shrine?) somewhere dedicated to such things.

how to make sure that everything you do is proper: do nothing

sorry, but i'm not that zen yet - and won't be until i'm cold and unmoving.

> And it's the
> least one would expect from a standards organisation,

a reasonable enough point. yes, if time is a luxury (rarely, but sometimes)
a standard can be iterated upon and hopefully done "right" as a result.
more often than not though, customer/market demands are far too impatient.

Tantek

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Without pain, without sacrifice, we would have nothing. microsoft.com/mac/ie

Received on Tuesday, 8 August 2000 14:50:43 UTC