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Well, no, actually the view is not defensible, because it insists on the arbitrary resolution being an implementation of a standard, which it isn't. The view f

Well, no, actually the view is not defensible, because it insists on the arbitrary resolution being an implementation of a standard, which it isn't. The view formulated in a non-misleading way is simply "if the standard does not specify semantics, I can as a matter of fact just use my own proprietary interpretation instead". Which is trivially true, but also completely useless if your goal is interoperability, while, if you don't care about interoperability, why care about the standard in the first place?

inimino 9y ago
People write software. Standards come later. Your standards zealotry is blinding you to how software development gets done and how the Web really works. You are calling "indefensible" the way the entire industry actually works. Maybe you want to step back and look at why that happens.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  1. Which prevents people from fixing their software to conform to the standards once they exist how exactly? 2. What is even your point? That the industry has an outstanding track record of interoperability and security? What exactly is it that makes the view defensible in your eyes?
  - inimino 9y ago
    1. See the entire history of the Web so far. Obviously the observation about browser market share and "Don't break the Web" has been made many times, I am not going to rehash it for you here. 2. Standards are a tool to improve interoperability. When standards are disconnected from reality and cannot be implemented by any actual players in the market, interoperability is harmed. It is not even neutral. The kind of attitude you are showing here is what got us the idiocy of XHTML2. That is, many of the people who cared most about standards and semantics on the Web went and threw their collective efforts into a black hole for years because they were too blindly idealistic to engage with or even acknowledge the actual industry, that, in their arrogance, they thought they were standardizing. Meanwhile everyone else happily ignored them and all their efforts had no real-world impact on anything, except that by taking attention away from other, more realistic, standardization efforts, they probably set real interoperability back several years.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      Which is all completely besides the point? Reverse engineering and reimplementing the semantics of another vendor is obviously very much the opposite of "inventing random meaning", but rather "implementing a de-facto standard", and as such obviously helps interoperability. But that in no way justifies the first vendor inventing that de-facto standard in the first place, whithout wich there would be no need for anyone to reverse-engineer and reimplement it. If all deviations by browser implementors from the formal standard were reimplementations of deviations by other vendors for the sake of better interoperability ... there would not be any deviations at all.

inimino 9y ago

People write software. Standards come later. Your standards zealotry is blinding you to how software development gets done and how the Web really works. You are calling "indefensible" the way the entire industry actually works. Maybe you want to step back and look at why that happens.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
1. Which prevents people from fixing their software to conform to the standards once they exist how exactly? 2. What is even your point? That the industry has an outstanding track record of interoperability and security? What exactly is it that makes the view defensible in your eyes?
- inimino 9y ago
  1. See the entire history of the Web so far. Obviously the observation about browser market share and "Don't break the Web" has been made many times, I am not going to rehash it for you here. 2. Standards are a tool to improve interoperability. When standards are disconnected from reality and cannot be implemented by any actual players in the market, interoperability is harmed. It is not even neutral. The kind of attitude you are showing here is what got us the idiocy of XHTML2. That is, many of the people who cared most about standards and semantics on the Web went and threw their collective efforts into a black hole for years because they were too blindly idealistic to engage with or even acknowledge the actual industry, that, in their arrogance, they thought they were standardizing. Meanwhile everyone else happily ignored them and all their efforts had no real-world impact on anything, except that by taking attention away from other, more realistic, standardization efforts, they probably set real interoperability back several years.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    Which is all completely besides the point? Reverse engineering and reimplementing the semantics of another vendor is obviously very much the opposite of "inventing random meaning", but rather "implementing a de-facto standard", and as such obviously helps interoperability. But that in no way justifies the first vendor inventing that de-facto standard in the first place, whithout wich there would be no need for anyone to reverse-engineer and reimplement it. If all deviations by browser implementors from the formal standard were reimplementations of deviations by other vendors for the sake of better interoperability ... there would not be any deviations at all.