Invisible wrote:
>  From what I've seen, the W3C standards are _mostly_ reasonable, 

It would be mostly reasonable if W3C was actually implementing those things 
in their browser. A "mostly reasonable" standard can come out of a throughly 
broken standards process, and vice versa.

> the ad-hoc made-up stuff that browser implementors come up with is a 
> nightmare.

In part because W3C has a broken standards process that fails to account for 
how the world actually works.

-- 
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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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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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> HTML5 is not W3C.

Even worse. :-)

-- 
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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Warp wrote:
>   It's a piece of software (or hardware, if we are technical).

It is, technically, the inverse of a modem. A modem takes a digital signal 
and modulates/demodulates it to make it analog. A codec takes an analog 
signal and codes/decodes it to make it digital. Hence, it's not the 
standard, but the device or process of following the standards.

-- 
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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Warp wrote:
> Eero Ahonen <aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid> wrote:
>> And when it's a piece of hardware, it most probably is a piece on
>> software on that hardware ;-).
> 
>   With simpler codecs it could be hardwired, so no software.

The old "voice scramblers" were that way: a comb filter to select out a 
bunch of frequencies, frequency shiufters to move them around, and then 
something to combine them up again.

-- 
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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>> the ad-hoc made-up stuff that browser implementors come up with is a 
>> nightmare.
> 
> In part because W3C has a broken standards process that fails to account 
> for how the world actually works.

Care to explain that one?

(I have no idea what the W3C standards process is. I just read the specs.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Darren New wrote:

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

You also by definition wouldn't have any standards in the first place, 
because nobody would ever implement anything even slightly similarly.

> 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.

Have you *seen* the FTP spec? Sure it works, but it's _horrible_! >_<

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> You also by definition wouldn't have any standards in the first place, 
> because nobody would ever implement anything even slightly similarly.

Not true. Look at the IETF spec process.  There are proposed standards that 
just don't become standards until several people have implemented it 
similarly enough that they interoperate in all the ways required by the spec.

W3C looks at what's going on, says "this would be a better way, so everyone 
should change how they work things."

> Have you *seen* the FTP spec? Sure it works, but it's _horrible_! >_<

It's actually not too bad, overall. And it has evolved over time. It's *way* 
better than HTTP for example.

Even so, put it this way: How many browsers can't get to the web server 
(HTTP, an IETF standard), compared to the number of browsers that render the 
page incorrectly (HTML, a W3C standard)?

-- 
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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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> the ad-hoc made-up stuff that browser implementors come up with is a 
>>> nightmare.
>>
>> In part because W3C has a broken standards process that fails to 
>> account for how the world actually works.
> 
> Care to explain that one?

They make stuff up, and then try to claim it's the standard. It's broken 
because there's no good reason for browsers that have already implemented 
things differently than what W3C later standardizes on to change.

> (I have no idea what the W3C standards process is. I just read the specs.)

Right. And what reason do you have to believe that *anyone* does or will 
follow those specs?

-- 
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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Darren New wrote:
> 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.
> 

On a related side note.. Wish the twits would standardize all their 
bloody download redirects, which they now all seem to bloody use, for no 
apparent reason, on 90% of the sites which plugins/programs that attempt 
to help download, or redirect to a more reliable manager, or just do 
anything beyond passing the file to the browsers ftp/http file transfer 
system. A few have mangled things so badly you can't even *get* a file 
from them if you have something installed, about 50% of them you can't 
use the normal "just click", or wait for their page to script load it, 
because it triggers a set of events in things like FlashGot, which 
results in the download not even starting, and then, in about 20% of 
cases, and this "never" happened until the last 1-2 years, you get the 
file downloaded, but the "name" passed to the downloader is wrong. I.e., 
you end up with something like:

local name	source
get.php		www.somefileserver.dum/files/realname.zip

Part of this is the fault of the manager, mind you, which doesn't check 
to make sure the destination name and the source are the same, but 
seriously.. This isn't being done, as near as I can tell, to undermine 
download managers or plugins, its designed to help the site track who is 
downloading, in most cases, and its getting continuously worse over 
time. And if it was an issue with trying to stop things like getright, 
why not make a client with "most" of the same features, provide some 
standard way to say, "This can't be downloaded via multiple 
connections.", which is usually the problem they are trying to stop, or 
just *leave out* that feature, and make it work with every damn site? 
Problem solved. Instead you have unreliable managers in the browsers, 
which can and *have* failed to properly download a file on me, resume, 
if they even do that, unreliably, can't keep running if you close the 
browser, and provide "no" other features at all, including warning you 
of non-unique names, or redirecting specific file types to specific 
folders, or anything else that a real manager provides.

File transfers that don't involve a bare client, or bittorrent, are 
becoming increasingly stupid and unusable.

-- 
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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