5 ms·

I don't think that's really true. Microsoft only tends to push incompatibilities AFTER it achieves dominance. For example, Internet Explorer was by far more s

I don't think that's really true. Microsoft only tends to push incompatibilities AFTER it achieves dominance. For example, Internet Explorer was by far more standards compliant than Netscape (at least through version 5). Microsoft's problem, IMHO, is they compete in two different ways. The first is the "catch up to the competitor that's beating us" phase. In this phase they usually allow engineers more control of the process so they can iterate fast enough to over take a competitor. Think IE (Netscape), Office (Wordperfect), Windows NT (Novell/IBM), etc... Once they overtake a competitor the big company aspect takes over with "managers" wanting to (a) take credit for the success and (b) create "strategic plans" to cement the success. That's when you start to see incompatibilities (and other stupid management tricks like pulling IE from every platform other than Windows). So as someone who has watched Microsoft for a long time I feel confident in saying they'll produce fairly compliant tools right up to the point where they gain some success in the market.

btilly 16y ago
I don't think that's really true. Microsoft only tends to push incompatibilities AFTER it achieves dominance. For example, Internet Explorer was by far more standards compliant than Netscape (at least through version 5). That's not how I remember it. Microsoft pushed lots of incompatibilities that had no uptake. (VBScript anyone?) Microsoft added lots of extensions to the standard. Because Microsoft did a good job on them, many made it into the standard and so now look standards compliant. (XML-RPC anyone?) But from the point of view of cross-browser compatibility, they were bad news at the time.
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  I think you're remembering things from a Netscape perspective. For example you cite vbscript which was introduced a mere 8 months after Javascript (which was called livescript at the time to match Netscape Livewire). So they were competing technologies and not either side ignoring a standard (MS to their credit quickly rushed jscript out when Javascript started to become dominant) (Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. Javascript was implemented by Netscape in Dec. '95. MS implemented Jscript in Aug 1996. Javascript was adopted as the ECMAScript standard in June '97) As for extensions I don't think you can consider those incompatibilities. Both sides were doing it. Yet on the Netscape side they were actually taking parts of the standard and not implementing them (which is something the open source team had to straighten out after it was turned over: http://oreilly.com/news/flanagan_1100.html http://oreilly.com/news/flanagan_1100.html) You can even find old IE reviews that point out Microsoft was implementing standards far quicker (like this one I found via wikipedia: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/671/internet-explorer-4 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/671/internet-expl...)
contextfree 16y ago
I'm skeptical about this "control by engineers = compatibility / standards compliance" conflation - it smells like an emotional association (control by engineers is good, standards are good, therefore control by engineers must correlate with standards compliance). To me it seems just as likely that engineers, who often have strong opinions and dreams about creating frameworks etc. the way they think is right, could be more likely to feel stifled by having to conform to somebody else's standard, and prefer to go their own way.
- TomOfTTB 16y ago
  I generally find engineers to be more in favor of standards than anyone else but that's anecdotal. The point I was actually making is the engineers are told to "catch up as quickly as possible" which leads to standards compliance because you don't have time to reinvent the wheel. So it's not an emotional reaction or judgement call it's just pragmatism.
  - contextfree 16y ago
    I'd distinguish between engineers who use the things that are/aren't standardized, and engineers who build them. The former often like standards because the pain of dealing with incompatibilities can overwhelm any possible advantage of doing things differently. The latter tend to have strong opinions about the technical details of what they're building, which may clash with what the standards dictate. Couple anecdotes: here's a quote from Richard Stallman: http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html "Richard: Basically, my attitude towards standards is that they are useful. They help users figure out how to support a variety of systems, and then they help system implementors figure out how to give the users what the users will expect. But you shouldn't treat standards as though they were gods. There's no need to. We support standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from them when that becomes more useful to users. ... It was already approved and we had already had a chance to object, so all I could do was make a comment. So I couldn't block approval of the standard because I was a voting member of the committee. I couldn't block approval of the standard on those grounds, so instead...I posted a notice about the coup in which the evil repressive forces of POSIX were being thrown off...To have an excuse to say that we still support the spec, if you define the environment variable, POSIX_ME_HARDER was the original way. Then a slightly prudish board member convinced me to change it to POSIXLY_CORRECT which I now think was a mistake. I should have left it as POSIX_ME_HARDER." It's interesting that IMO Stallman-the-politician (for me not a negative term, BTW) comes off as much more of a standards advocate than Stallman-the-engineer.

btilly 16y ago

I don't think that's really true. Microsoft only tends to push incompatibilities AFTER it achieves dominance. For example, Internet Explorer was by far more standards compliant than Netscape (at least through version 5). That's not how I remember it. Microsoft pushed lots of incompatibilities that had no uptake. (VBScript anyone?) Microsoft added lots of extensions to the standard. Because Microsoft did a good job on them, many made it into the standard and so now look standards compliant. (XML-RPC anyone?) But from the point of view of cross-browser compatibility, they were bad news at the time.

TomOfTTB 16y ago
I think you're remembering things from a Netscape perspective. For example you cite vbscript which was introduced a mere 8 months after Javascript (which was called livescript at the time to match Netscape Livewire). So they were competing technologies and not either side ignoring a standard (MS to their credit quickly rushed jscript out when Javascript started to become dominant) (Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. Javascript was implemented by Netscape in Dec. '95. MS implemented Jscript in Aug 1996. Javascript was adopted as the ECMAScript standard in June '97) As for extensions I don't think you can consider those incompatibilities. Both sides were doing it. Yet on the Netscape side they were actually taking parts of the standard and not implementing them (which is something the open source team had to straighten out after it was turned over: http://oreilly.com/news/flanagan_1100.html http://oreilly.com/news/flanagan_1100.html) You can even find old IE reviews that point out Microsoft was implementing standards far quicker (like this one I found via wikipedia: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/671/internet-explorer-4 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/671/internet-expl...)

contextfree 16y ago

I'm skeptical about this "control by engineers = compatibility / standards compliance" conflation - it smells like an emotional association (control by engineers is good, standards are good, therefore control by engineers must correlate with standards compliance). To me it seems just as likely that engineers, who often have strong opinions and dreams about creating frameworks etc. the way they think is right, could be more likely to feel stifled by having to conform to somebody else's standard, and prefer to go their own way.

TomOfTTB 16y ago
I generally find engineers to be more in favor of standards than anyone else but that's anecdotal. The point I was actually making is the engineers are told to "catch up as quickly as possible" which leads to standards compliance because you don't have time to reinvent the wheel. So it's not an emotional reaction or judgement call it's just pragmatism.
- contextfree 16y ago
  I'd distinguish between engineers who use the things that are/aren't standardized, and engineers who build them. The former often like standards because the pain of dealing with incompatibilities can overwhelm any possible advantage of doing things differently. The latter tend to have strong opinions about the technical details of what they're building, which may clash with what the standards dictate. Couple anecdotes: here's a quote from Richard Stallman: http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html http://karmak.org/archive/2003/01/12-14-99.epl.html "Richard: Basically, my attitude towards standards is that they are useful. They help users figure out how to support a variety of systems, and then they help system implementors figure out how to give the users what the users will expect. But you shouldn't treat standards as though they were gods. There's no need to. We support standards in the ways that are useful to users, and we depart from them when that becomes more useful to users. ... It was already approved and we had already had a chance to object, so all I could do was make a comment. So I couldn't block approval of the standard because I was a voting member of the committee. I couldn't block approval of the standard on those grounds, so instead...I posted a notice about the coup in which the evil repressive forces of POSIX were being thrown off...To have an excuse to say that we still support the spec, if you define the environment variable, POSIX_ME_HARDER was the original way. Then a slightly prudish board member convinced me to change it to POSIXLY_CORRECT which I now think was a mistake. I should have left it as POSIX_ME_HARDER." It's interesting that IMO Stallman-the-politician (for me not a negative term, BTW) comes off as much more of a standards advocate than Stallman-the-engineer.