Browser Wars!
- Let browser vendors innovate as fast as they can
- With the end-goal of interoperability through standardization
- Increasing pressure on other vendors to interoperate, since there are actually four major vendors now, which are all important to most developers
And thereby a better world can be had.
Case in point: Incredibly useful features that used to be IE only, but are now being standardized and implemented by other vendors, such as XMLHTTPRequest, getBoundingClientRect, getClientRects, innerHTML, contentEditable and support for XML/XSLT. Uhm, that basically explains why Xopus is still very much IE oriented – despite all its problems.
Addendum: Proprietary web development with the purpose of standardization is much better than proprietary, period. The latter is inevitable, so what do we do about it?
I agree, although I think bringing them to standardization a little earlier could have helped. This is currently happening with client-side storage,
video,canvas, etc. which benefited from feedback through an (in)formal standards process.Anne van Kesteren | 17 December 2007, 13:38 | link
Well the increasing pressure should make standardization happen earlier. If other vendors start implementing your features, it’s in the best interest of all parties to make sure the implementations are compatible.
Mark Wubben | 17 December 2007, 13:59 | link
That’s not really true if you’re the market leader. It is also less true if the features you introduce are patent encumbered and you’re not planning on giving those away for free. Another problem is that if you simply introduce features and let other people copy it is very likely the design is not that great (
canvaswas missing a closing tag at first).Anne van Kesteren | 17 December 2007, 22:40 | link