Patrick Elliott wrote:
> I think Darren is forgetting the insane mess

Not at all. I'm pointing out that the W3C has a broken standards process, 
not that what they come up with is bad, but that it isn't *standard*.

> that IE 
> created "before" MS decided that actually following universal standards 
> was a good idea, 

But they're not universal standards. For example, IE will only store 20 
cookies per site.  That's because that was the Mozilla standard. When W3C 
comes along and says "store more", and major business' web sites don't work 
with those "standard" browsers because W3C changed the universal standard to 
something "better" and then brow-beat all the others into following those 
standards, people blame IE for not getting with the program.

You can't constantly change standards that you expect a whole raft of people 
to implement and expect good results, no matter the quality of those standards.

 > 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.

Bzzzt.

> 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. 

But that's exactly the problem with "making up standards". The broken 
standards process *is* the *cause* of what you describe.

If you said "nothing becomes an official web standard until three browsers 
implement it identically", you by definition wouldn't have this problem.

When's the last time you said "My ftp server won't talk to your FTP client"? 
Why? Because there were several interoperative implementations *before* it 
was a standard.  Sure, sometimes you get a mess like email address parsing, 
but that's the price you pay for interoperability.

The web really isn't mature enough to depend on all the cutting-edge 
pixel-perfect features that people want to use effortlessly. If it was, you 
wouldn't have a bunch of competing browsers constantly in the news, as they 
would all be commodities.

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

It's no worse a mess than lots of other things. It's just that IETF has been 
doing it much longer and figured out the right way to make it work.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Human nature dictates that toothpaste tubes spend
   much longer being almost empty than almost full.

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