Lighten up, people. This is still very immature technology. We don't
know yet what makes a good markup language for this medium. I don't
think many of you would bet that three years from now the common markup
won't be significantly different from today's. The degree of
standardization that exists today in HTML is *amazing* given the growth
rate in use, provision, and capability of the medium.
If you come into this expecting there to be one true standard, for that
standard to evolve in a controlled way, and for vendors to support
nothing but that standard, you are bound to be triply disappointed.
There is no computer language yet that has met those expectations. When
the founders of Ada attempted to ensure such a model, they succeeded
only in radically slowing the introduction and acceptance of the
language. Despite strong international standards and multiple
conformance test suites, neither C nor UNIX meets those three
expectations.
The C standard is five years old and there are still thousands of
development organizations writing non-standard C. And you're
frustrated and complaining because year-old products don't conform to
six-month-old standards (or standards that haven't even been accepted
yet by their sponsoring bodies)? The WG is vitally important. There
are hundreds of user agents and there will be many times more in a few
years. There needs to be a strong standard that addresses as broad as
possible a subset of the well-established functionality. Acceptance of
the standard will always lag its evolution, and customer-oriented
vendors will always provide backward compatibility for those of their
features that didn't make it into standards. Some things will get into
the standard and will turn out to be wrong or inadequate and will be
changed in later revs.
There is no reason to take the standards process's natural hysteresis as
a sign of failure. The authors of every successful standard could tell
you the same kinds of stories you all are telling about this standard.
This standard differs only in the degree to which compatibility and
interoperability drive growth. Netscape happens to be the leader today;
there is no reason (especially with the key OSs providing their own user
agents) to expect they will continue to be the defining browser. If you
think Netscape is arrogant and unresponsive to the standards process,
you clearly haven't dealt much with Microsoft. There is enormous value
in moving a continually growing fraction of the functionality into
common practice and standardizing it; there is also enormous value in
vendors pushing the medium into new functionality and expanding the
envelope.
Don't panic.
scott
-- scott preece motorola/mcg urbana design center 1101 e. university, urbana, il 61801 phone: 217-384-8589 fax: 217-384-8550 internet mail: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com