Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Mon, Aug 14, 2000 at 05:55:30PM -0400, Thomas A. Beckett wrote:
>       Paul Gilster pans Microsoft's new release of Internet Explorer, in
> particular focusing on it's departure from Web standards.  It's a
> succinct and well-written diatribe.  

For what it's worth, I figure I should jump in here and say that I'm on
the steering committee of the Web Standards Project. The site is currently
down, due to the usual snafus with NSI, but you can get there via:

 http://209.1.14.77/

...until they get things straightened out. 

In a nutshell, the WSP was founded as an advocacy group to encourage
the major browser vendors to stick to the task of implementing the
core Web standards, which we defined as HTML 4.0, XML 1.0, CSS 1.0 &
2.0, XSL, the DOM Level 1 (Core and HTML) and ECMAScript. We're not
against innovation, as long as it doesn't stand in the way of getting
a core foundation of open standards implementations. We believe that
media pressure due in part to the WSP's activities was partially
responsible for Mozilla/Netscape's decision to drop their archaic
rendering engine in favor of one that supported core standards (some
of which hadn't even been defined at the time the original engine was
coded). We also believe that similar media pressures have helped drive
Microsoft towards better standards support, and if nothing else, we've
managed to make "standards support" a line item and bitching point in
the minds of software reviewers and maybe even consumers. And that's
something, given the mediocre quality of such reviews prior to our
activities ("Look! Auction trackers and whirlygigs of all types! You
can change the color of your toolbar! Whee!")...

We recently took MS to task for letting IE5/Win ship without
substantial improvements in standards support, and similarly so for
IE5.5/Win, while we lauded the Microsoft IE/Mac team for giving us
such a great browser. We have also recently made a lot of noise for
taking AOL/Netscape to task for not yet shipping the browser we were
promised back in 1998, and for instead focusing on building a
"platform", which, cool as it is, still hasn't managed to be a
shipping browser. We took a lot of heat for our stand, especially
since we had taken such pride in our role in Mozilla ditching the old
rendering engine, but I think we're still in the right for doing
so. It makes it a lot harder to argue effectively for standards
support when the only company shipping a standards-compliant browser
(Microsoft) has no real competition in the market (Opera's effort
notwithstanding, it's never achieved the market penetration we need as
Web developers if we want to stop wasting our money and our clients'
money providing silly workarounds, developing sites twice or more, for
different platform/browser combinations, etc.)

Anyway, I'm still hopeful that we'll see our mission realized, and we
can all go back to bashing Flash ;) If anyone wants to know more, or
get involved, there's more info here:

 http://209.1.14.77

(hopefully, the DevX/ProjectCool folks can get things fixed in the 
near future, this has been extremely frustrating for all involved.)

Steve

-- 
http://a.jaundicedeye.com/weblog/
because it just annoys people when I talk to myself...