Bb's RealTech

Hmm. I've now listened to the WaSP/MS call. Pissed me off to have people relatively meekly proposing various alternatives for Chris Wilson's approval, and not really giving him any actual pushback. Where were MS's alternate suggestions? Where was the insistence from the WaSP on the entirely reasonable principle that standards-supporting developers should not have to pay for IE's technical debt?

Furthermore at the outset Aaron Gustafson dismissed his own reaction (a year ago) as 'emotional', explicitly including the community reaction under that label. Bah. Disappointment is an emotion. Rage is an emotion. So is Fury, and Righteous Indignation. The label tells you almost nothing about the behavior or event that provoked the emotion, and certainly nothing about whether the emotion is justified under the circumstances. Dismissing the reactions as 'emotional' is just wrong.

Having got all that out of the way, the suggestion at the end of using the XHTML 'strict' doctype to trigger 'edge' behavior seems like it might work as a win-win compromise without having to mess around with new headers or meta elements. I'll have to think about that some more.

Note that the question that was asked about what happens when IE9 is introduced was left open, unresolved, unacknowledged, and unanswered.

Michael, I was more than a bit unhappy at that staged phone conference. Did you see what the title for the WaSP meeting was at SxSW? "Not breaking the web". When did the WaSP completely and thoroughly sell out to Microsoft?

Did you see what the title for the WaSP meeting was at SxSW? "Not breaking the web".

I hadn't seen that. Hmm.

When did the WaSP completely and thoroughly sell out to Microsoft?

I don't think that's an accurate characterization of what's going on here.

Instead, I think that the WaSP used to be insurgents with little to lose by poking browser-makers in the eye (after all, support for standards couldn't have got much worse, could it?), and now they're incumbents. The WaSP seems to be focused on consolidating the gains made so far and not rocking the boat. After all, the community now has something to lose if MS pulls back on it's support for standards, which might just happen if the IE8 launch goes badly from their perspective.

The thing is, I think this is an empty threat. We're already seeing the effects of a new 'strategy tax' where we get little to no support in IE for 'recent' standards (like SVG) that might compete with Microsoft's new proprietary technologies like Silverlight. I suppose we ought to be grateful that Microsoft isn't poisoning the well with broken implementations of SVG etc… Well, no actually, I don't feel grateful at all. 'Best viewed in Silverlight' isn't really any better than 'Best viewed in IE'. And if Microsoft does in fact backslide on standards support from the current somewhat halfhearted policy, they will simply start losing marketshare again.

Perhaps we just need a new insurgent organization if the WaSP is now filling a different role.

"Perhaps we just need a new insurgent organization if the WaSP is now filling a different role."

Indeed. What I'm seeing is the people who pushed so hard for standards years ago have made their names and fortunes off this effort, and now they don't really care. As long as their events are attended and people by their books or pay their consulting fees, heck, what's another little Microsoft specific tag here and there?

The real key is whether Microsoft will support XHTML in this release. If it doesn't, it never will. That is a given. There is no valid reason at all for not supporting it now. None. This, to me, is the make or break on Microsoft's supposed commitment to standards.

If they don't support XHTML, whether people create to XHTML or not, we won't have any choice but to have a browser war. Not unless we want to just give up, and either smoke AIR or drink Silverlight and give any pretense of an open environment.