When it comes to standards, it seems like Microsoft is always on the wrong side of the argument.
Microsoft has always battled rumors that it has a secret “standards mantra” amongst its upper management. It is known as the the three E’s. Those E’s stand for “embrace (the standard), extend (the standard) and extinguish (the competition).”
The HTML standard, and what they did to it, are a perfect example of this.
In the early days of the wild wild web there was NCSA Mosaic, the earliest popular web browser. Mosaic begat Netscape Navigator. And from the same ashes came Internet Explorer. Version 4 of these browsers was hardly distinguishable. On the surface.
Meanwhile, a tiny standards organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) had released a comprehensive RFC documenting what HTML is supposed to be capable of. Originally Microsoft embraced this standard, but it wasn’t long before they decided that there were a whole lot of things it was missing. Things like event handlers and page transitions.
And IE would render a lot of poorly formed HTML. And I do mean poorly. Put an attribute in a tag without a value? No problem. No doublequotes around your attribute value? No problem. Anyone who has ever tried parsing bad XML knows how frustrating it can be to have just one illegal character in your CDATA. IE let it all through and didn’t really adhere to any convention of rules.
As a web developer, learning to build web pages for this browser made it into a kind of “Dark Art.” Building HTML tables was like sorcery, hyperlink an image and hide the annoying blue border? Without using a stylesheet? Oooooh, you are the <jedi>master</jedi>.
This is probably going to turn out to be one of those posts where I start out strong, focused and having a point, then rapidly devolve into blathering, nonsensical gobbledeygook right about…
Here.
Oh, so the idea was, join up with everyone else in “embracing” the standard. Love it so much that you add on your own stuff to the technology, so much so that your “player” or “reader” or “application” is the only one that can read all those extra little features. Now that everyone is using all the cool new tricks that you and you alone have employed no one will want to use the boring old standardized document drive (in this case, a web broswer). And voila, no more competition.
To be continued…
QuantumTom 