Invisible wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>> *Who* is trying to describe a standard?  W3C seems to make up 
>> "standards" out of whole cloth, and then people get upset when those 
>> who are already following de facto standards don't switch to use W3C's 
>> poorly thought-out messes and make themselves unmarketable commodities 
>> at the same time.
> 
>  From what I've seen, the W3C standards are _mostly_ reasonable, whereas 
> the ad-hoc made-up stuff that browser implementors come up with is a 
> nightmare.
> 
Precisely.

> Then again, W3C does from time to time come up with a few questionable 
> design decisions.

Everyone is likely to do that. The real question is whether or not you 
have one central group that can both screw up an idea, but also fix it, 
or 5 different groups, which ***if you are lucky*** might be talking to 
each other this week, coming up with 2-3 sort of similar 
implementations. I think Darren is forgetting the insane mess that IE 
created "before" MS decided that actually following universal standards 
was a good idea, standards that are, to the best ability of the other 
browser makers, ***not*** based on their own loose and random standards, 
but one W3C standards.

The *real* problem isn't that they make up odd standards, its that they 
provide a few limited test pages to attempt to render, to match 
compliance with "some" features, but they have no actual system to show 
"how" the features are supposed to really interact to *get* that result. 
The effect being that even compliant browsers do things out of order, or 
incompletely, resulting in a *close*, but *failed* test. Worse, due to 
them being so interdependent, in some cases, one might be closer than 
another, but with one major flaw, while something else could have 
several minor flaws, but "look" more compliant, even though its not.

In that respect, I agree there is a nasty mess.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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