OT: Standards Compliance (was: [SVGMobile12] About vector graphics and other specification)

Hi, Ian-

Ian Hickson wrote:
| 
| On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, Doug Schepers wrote:
| > 
| > Yes, it's unfortunate that Microsoft doesn't care about supporting 
| > standards.
| 
| In Microsoft's defence, they, like all vendors, must decide 
| which specifications to apply their limited resources 
| towards.

That's a very generous definition of "limited." This past year, Microsoft
has had $40 billion in sales and 60,000 employees. I think the word you
intended was "finite," not "limited." 

They have also had a rather large team (ok, not large for Microsoft... Only
20+ employees) working on the Sparkle project for the past 6 years. If you
watch their recent demo video [1], you will see that they have, with XAML,
created something that is almost-but-not-quite SVG. In fact, I speculate
that SVG has a good chance of being a subset of XAML. If they cared about
standards, they could have diverted a couple of man-days to getting it to
render SVG (as well as their own custom XML-based vector graphics language)
and included it in IE7.


| There are far more "Web" specifications and standards than 
| any browser vendor has the time to implement, thus, not all 
| specs get implemented.

True. For example, Specs that would prevent them from gaining market
dominance, but would greatly increase the technical and semantic (thus
accessible) potential of the Web (SVG) do not get implemented. Specs that
cost them very little, don't threaten their utter control over the market
space, and get them political points (CSS) do. Is this understandable
behavior? For a predatory money machine, yes. For a socially conscious
company, no. 

That's one reason I say they don't care about standards. You can agree or
disagree with my judgement of them, but the facts speak for themselves.


[1] http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=115387 (warning: announcer
is extremely annoying, and video is far too long)


Regards-
Doug

doug . schepers  @ vectoreal.com
www.vectoreal.com ...for scalable solutions.

Received on Thursday, 22 September 2005 03:20:41 UTC