[plug] Standards

[Craig Ringer]

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 09:49, Garry wrote:
> I read something yesterday which made my blood boil.
> 
> In the latest (April 2004) APC Magazine on page 26, David Emberton argues that web standards are big, dumb and don't work.

Frankly, to me the main issue seems to be BROKEN CLIENT SOFTWARE and web
developers who code to that, rather than the standard. While this is
always going to be an issue, it's particularly bad with CSS2 - a very
nice standard (IMHO) which is almost unusable thanks to IE's brokenness.

This is an issue with standards in general, but others (TCP/IP, for
example) seem to suffer it to a truly minute extent in comparison.
Perhaps because people feel more pressure to write software that
conforms to the standard.

I personally think web standards, warts and all, made the web possible
in the first place. "Sorry, I use FizzPop not Mosaic ; can you make a
FizzPop version of that page?" next person: "Sorry, I use MacView, and
your web page doesn't open. Can you make ...." 

He also mentions SVG in his list of 'things nobody is using'. In that
case, it's quite new and not widely supported in client apps yet - so
unsurprisingly, it's not being widely used on the 'net. It is seeing a
lot of adoption in other areas, as a nice standard vector image format,
and I'm starting to see some SVG on the web now.

I guess I see variety and choice as more important than he does. You
don't need standards if you only care about working with a particular
subset of the available software.

Craig Ringer