Re: myths of software "standards"

[Steve Reid <steve@edmweb.com>]

> there is tremendous ranting and raving in the Web world about how
> the HTML standard is fragmenting because of Netscape etc., and there
> is so much angst about trying to devise a *single* cohesive, unified
> standard that "everyone" follows. people talk as if Netscape is
> trying to "hijack" the standard, when in my opinion they are performing
> a valuable public service of trying to hammer the bits into useful
> form. everything they have proposed could not be handled by the
> earlier standards-- and if it could have been, chances are they would
> have used that standard.

Sure, the Netscape extensions are nice. And it's nice to have an operating
system (M$-DOG) pre-installed on every hard drive. But Net$cape, like M$,
was trying to esablish a dominant "follow-us-or-die" position in the 
industry. 

Yes, the Net$cape extensions allow people to do stuff that they wouldn't 
otherwise be able to do. But, the extensions *could have* been 
implemented in such a way that using them wouldn't be detrimental to 
non-Net$cape browsers. Instead, they've altered the World Wide Web in 
such a way that it can only be viewed "correctly" with Net$cape.

The rest of your post was quite interesting. I *do* think it would be 
good to have multiple, interchangeable formats like we do for graphics. 
What we really need to make that happen are DETAILED SPECIFICATIONS.