On this topic, all I want to say is direct you to the W3C site and have a look at the latest suit between MickeySoft and W3C. Bill is employing his old obfuscation techniques to confuse the marketplace. The same way as they attempted to kill Java by releasing a proprietary version of Java. Thank god Sun sued them or we'd have MS Java and everyone else's java. That'd mean you'd have to author software to support both standards.. in time people would just support MS since it had the biggest market and most widely used commercial development tools. Now they are dropping support for some of the W3C standards like CCS.. which is how they confuse the market place, then take it over. It is the history of MS. I remember the days when all the wordprocessor developers released a programmers kit to allow other companies to convert their document formats to other wordprocessors. A few years back when MS word had become the dominant WP on the market, MS stopped publishing their format and later proceeded to sue other companies that had worked out their document format for supposedly reverse engining.. of course MS would never reverse engineer anything would they? not stacker etc ... Open standards protect the consumer from being controlled by militant capitalists. That's my bitch for the day :) Chris On Wed, 16 Aug 2000 11:03:43 +0100, Derek Fountain wrote:
I fully sympathise with your position, but this is a battle the free world just cannot afford to loose. There are open standards and there is Microsoft's standard. The open standard must win, otherwise Redmond controls the 'net. Heaven help us if we allow ourselves to get into a position where a closed proprietary standard controls the method of data exchange over the web in same way one controls the exchange of word processed documents today.
Forget Netscape v4.xx, that battle is long lost. Web standards will boil down to 2 things: the open W3C way, with Mozilla based browsers, and the closed way, with IE based browsers. It's going to be a major inconvenience, and each day that passes without a gold Mozilla release the problem gets a bit worse, but Mozilla must be supported. Unless, of course, you're going to be happy to buy Windows2002 and Office2002 in order to surf the net.
Ahem. :-} I'll get off this soapbox now. :)
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