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June 18, 2007
Rules before results
Rules before results: One approach to web technology debates what rules to follow, and then debates for a much longer period how not everyone follows those rules. (Another approach focuses on what capabilities consumer machines actually have today... how quickly people install Adobe Flash Player 9, etc.) Molly Holzschlag, of Web Standards Project, the conference circuit, and now Microsoft, says that all discussions of HTML5 and XHTML1.1 should be put on hold until all implementations on the world's machines match existing specs. Meanwhile, Dion Almaer points out that even simple little things like a JavaScript "onLoad" event will vary across different implementations of these specs. I think the spec-first process is vital, a necessity, another fragment of our overall web ecology. But I think it's nuts to insist that a rules-first approach will ever solve all human needs -- the browser-supremacists seem to be missing a lot. The actual ecology is richer than such puritanism imagines.
Posted by JohnDowdell at June 18, 2007 3:48 PM