Re: CSS is doomed (10 years per version ?!?)

On 6/30/05, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Orion Adrian wrote:
> >
> > "Say, 2 years for specification, 3 years before adoption by all common
> > browser engines, and another 5 years before the majority of users have
> > upgraded. That adds up to 10 years. Could be better, could be worse, but
> > you're talking about many years in any case."
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > If anyone thinks I'm going to put up with a sloppy system for a decade,
> > then I'm just going to stick with Microsoft which doesn't seem to have
> > this problem.
> 
> Really? It's been about 5 years since Avalon started being developed,
> it'll be another year before it's released (assuming no more setbacks),
> and it'll take at least 4 years for Avalon to be widely distributed enough
> to be usable as a development platform. That's 10 years.
> 
> Compared to most industries, 10 years from initial planning to ubiquitous
> distribution is absolutely amazing. In some industries it can take 50+
> years to go from R&D to widely used product.

Avalong is a slightly different beast. It's also a 1.0 release. I
expect major new specs to take a long time, but I don't expect
incremental updates or feature revisions to take that long. Office
comes out with a new version every 1-3 years. While I agree that
Microsoft could spend more time with it's customers doing usability
research, I still find their process preferable.

Remember GDI/GDI+ didn't exactly sit around while Avalon was in the works.

Orion Adrian

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 10:46:47 UTC