Comments on: credit where it’s due

By: shaver

shaver — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 02:50:20 +0000

That's true, you had said so, though the decision being announced isn't quite the same as the decision being made in the open, or in a way that permitted broad feedback. It's more that the mechanism -- theoretically one that's of cross-browser utility, given its naming and the examples on the site -- was designed in secret.

There's more of this in the IE8 unveil -- for example, XDomainRequest is just sort of out of nowhere, though MSFT ostensibly participated in the W3C's efforts to find a solution to that problem for XMLHttpRequest. No proposal I can find anywhere about the scriptable connection-limit stuff, nor the timeout extension to XHR itself.

By: Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:31:58 +0000

Hey Mike, It’s not actually crrect to say that the decision to default to compatibility was made “in secret”. I’d been saying for over a year, in every talk I’ve done, that we would be needing web developers to opt in to standards compliance.

By: Mitchel Tyrell

Mitchel Tyrell — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 05:52:34 +0000

"It just takes one look at the recent OOXML standardization mess (covered e.g. on groklaw.net)"

That's kind of sound like, "It just takes one look at the Democratic presidential compaign mess (covered e.g. on Fox News)"

By: Henri Sivonen

Henri Sivonen — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 10:48:46 +0000

Re: XDomainRequest, see a blog post by the editor of the competing W3C spec: http://annevankesteren.nl/2008/03/ie8-bad

By: shaver

shaver — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:26:45 +0000

Indeed, Microsoft is a big company, and can act in multifarious and conflicting ways, but since I was willing to blame “Microsoft” for bad behaviour by the IE team, it only seems fair to credit “Microsoft” for the good behaviour. You’re probably right that the IE team is more enlightened here than some other parts of the company; working on the web has that effect on people sometimes. :)

By: Kim Sullivan

Kim Sullivan — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:00:05 +0000

I wouldn’t talk about Microsoft in general, it’s probably just the IE team… It just takes one look at the recent OOXML standardization mess (covered e.g. on groklaw.net) to see that it’s still the same old Microsoft it always was, the good decision on IE8 notwithstanding.

Sorry if it’s a bit OT, but I’ve just read some of the more gory details of the voting on OOXML, and I can’t but think “dear god, tell me this isn’t really happening, there’s has to be some kind of misunderstanding, this can’t be real…”.