IMO, in most instances, it's because MS have a different idea for how things should be done. They slow up their deployment of poorer solutions until their own ideas are properly heard out. You could argue that this is the wrong way to do it, but I would rather proper consideration be given to all possible development ideas without prejudice.
Sam: Care to give us examples of some of Microsoft's better ideas that haven't been given enough consideration?
hehe! Okay, touché.. but the standard was proposed and rejected. I don't think the reasons for rejecting it were good. The scroll bar is a design element, and it should be within the remit of the page designer to control.
What?!? The scroll bar is part of the browser UI, not the document. The designer has absolutely no business messing with it.
Ultimately, the designer has to cede control over the display of any page to the end user anyway, as local style definitions can override anything provided by the designer. This tends to upset people coming from a print design background but, y'know, ho-hum
I've not been knee-deep in the W3C since 2001, but from what I can gather nothing much has changed since then. I was invited to join the W3C in 1997, but for one reason or another I never did. I've been frustrated by the rejection of Microsoft's attempts to get involved in the ODF, I'm left in awe of the Linux community's resistance to OpenXML (which seems to be purely on the basis of Microsoft's support for it) and the whole thing smacks of bloody-mindedness and hypocracy.
I disagree. Once you have a scrollable DIV, you have a design element. Once you have a design element, you have to cede it to the designer.
Well things like conditional CSS that mixes javascript with CSS at first sound like a "different" idea and sometimes like a "good" idea. However you soon realize that the reason you are employing it is to fix errors IE has in it's CSS interpreter, things that have been in there since IE5.
OpenXML has a lot of factors which are against it - starting from the licensing right down to continuous use of non-standard or proprietary elements while there were already available standards, errors in proposed formulas (as they appeared on msdn blogs, use of decimal dates, etc. Sort of defeats it's own name as being "Open".
IMO once you have a scrollable div, you have a badly designed document. Giving the designer responsible any more rope sounds like a bad idea.
Regardless; I still fail to understand why Microsoft would object to such obviously-useful properties as max- and min-width. Personally I believe they didn't implement them yet because they don't particularly give a toss about supporting open standards.
I also find their bloody-minded misinterpretation of the box model to be nothing short of inexcusably obstructive and counter-productive. Perhaps that's another reason why the W3C don't take them seriously - because they routinely behave like spoilt children.
It's possible!
But in the meantime, I'm just spectating and, like everyone else, working within what's available. I don't believe in the W3C as a "body of men" any more than I believe in the Vatican. It's self-appointed, slow as hell, and as bitchy as a church coffee morning.
But in the meantime, I'm just spectating and, like everyone else, working within what's available. I don't believe in the W3C as a "body of men" any more than I believe in the Vatican. It's self-appointed, slow as hell, and as bitchy as a church coffee morning.
Enter WhatWG.
Yes, the W3C sort of lost it a bit, going for perfect semantics with xhtml (I'm of the opinion that it's still a fairly reasonable idea that needs some development, but thats neither here nor there), but I believe they are starting to get their arses in gear a little. There's nothing to say that WhatWG couldn't be the development ground and W3C takes the "best" ideas and throws them into a document that people actually take heed of. I'd rather see this than WhatWG and W3C compete at least - that would only make life more interesting
oooh! ty! I've never even heard of WhatWG. Off to learn...
The reason people don't like that standard has nothing to do with MS backing it. It's because it OOXML does in 6546 pages what ODF does in 867 by reusing existing standards, and because the OOXML contains collections of XML tags that are simply defined as "do this like Word 95 does". How are you supposed to implement something like that unless you're Microsoft and have the Word 95 source code? The underhanded tactics MS has been using to "persuade" companies to vote for OOXML as an ISO standard certainly hasn't helped matters either.
Some zealots may be against anything MS regardless of merits, but in many cases it's very much justified. OOXML and Web standards being a couple of them in my opinion.
Pfft.. there's plenty flowing in the opposite direction too. Some perfectly reasonable arguments for including backwards-compatibility (a core problem I have with W3C), piddled on by Sun/IBM at every opportunity. Frankly, the anti-MS movement is sponsored by groups of people more interested in advancing t ... er's) future requirements.
You make out that Microsoft is the bad guy, but their practice is better suited to ME, the end-user, than this crap that Sun/IBM is pulling. I could cite a lot more examples and if you want, I will. I just would suggest that slashdot's not the only place to get information, and it's no less tainted and biased. It's tabloid, IMO, and it's pants because of it.
You make out that Microsoft is the bad guy, but their practice is better suited to ME, the end-user, than this crap that Sun/IBM is pulling. I could cite a lot more examples and if you want, I will. I just would suggest that slashdot's not the only place to get information, and it's no less tainted and biased. It's tabloid, IMO, and it's pants because of it.
I don't make Microsoft out to be anything. I only comment on what I see from my day to day work doing web design. I really don't care about the politics these muppets are running behind the scenes. All I care about is that there is a standard everyone has agreed on (even MS), Microsoft isn't following it, and it makes my life miserable.
Same when it comes to OOXML. I'm sure IBM/Sun and the other big companes are just as dirty as Microsoft when it comes to playing politics, but I just don't care. From where I'm sitting ODF is by far the superior standard. It is superior because it reuses existing standards wherever possible (SVG, JPEG, MathML etc.) instead of defining new standards for everything, and because it doesn't contain undefined references to behavior found in specific closed source software. OOXML fails on both accounts and thus isn't worthy of becoming an ISO standard in my opinion. No-one other than Microsoft can possibly implement the damn thing to spec. How is that an open standard?
And yes, of course slashdot is biased. So is every other news source on the planet. That doesn't make what they're reporting on less true. You always need to read around to get a complete picture of what's going on.
We probably won't agree on which is the better standard, but perhaps we'll agree that, with these muppets at the ship's helm, we'd better all watch out for icebergs.
Oh, and pray that WhatWG isn't the Lucitania, coming to rescue us.
Oh, and pray that WhatWG isn't the Lucitania, coming to rescue us.
That still don't change the fact that most of MS's attempts at standardising and interpreting things are bad and/or make little or no sense and/or spring up from attempts of theirs to patch up previous boo-boos.
You do know that it was founded and "self-appointed" by one of the inventors of the web, right? What did you expect? A public vote?
With the exact same logic one could argue that any large corporation that has formed monopolies, etc is exactly the same. So why trust them more? Whether it's IBM or MS or Sun or any of them. IMO, the only thing that put some spark into MS was turning itself into Vishnusoft with their acquisition of so many enthusiastic Indian programmers.
The only time the w3c has truly annoyed me was with their delay on getting their head wrapped around the concept of the XMLHttpRequest. And that's because, imo, AJAX is fun to use.
Anyhow, w3c and corporations aside, the point is that we got tools that work now, and they work very well. Despite our little bitching about 1px deficits in the interpretation of CSS by one engine or another, despite small features which do not get support by one engine or another, we still have alot of "middle ground" that is compatible, usable and quite frankly great to get the job done. Ever since I took up using CSS I basically haven't looked back to tables and spacer gifs for getting an interface done.
At first it was a pisser because yes, there was a lot of huge incompatibilities - later on you had to resort to crap like this or if you didn't feel like it, you had to hack it all up with comments and make a mess out of it. But nowadays, seriously, I can get mozilla/opera/ie6+7 to play along quite well using the same CSS >80% of the time.
Ah, try it with the new Opera 9.5 alpha.. which has a pretty decent support.. altough with some bugs.
what a nasty thread lol
Yeah, I heard the new Opera is looking good. But if I get CSS working in that, I still have to hac!k the code to make it work for everything else
Nahh.. it's good to vent
In my experience Firefox 2, Opera 9, Konqueror (KHTML) and the new Safari 3 are more or less the same when it comes to rendering normal CSS2. The only real problems I've had recently is Gecko rendering negative text-indent percentages wrong (ems and pxes were fine), and the infamous 1px rounding error in Gecko. I'm sure there are a few differences here and there, but on the whole they're all pretty good.
Could be I'm just rubbing them the right way though. I feel rested.
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