Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 432 Editor's Choice: 45
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Not "Chirping"
[Read the article: Opera's misguided antitrust charges against Microsoft]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The biggest standards compliance issue that actually affects people, and one I have to deal with every day, is failure to adhere to the W3C CSS box model - that is the primary reason pages render differently in IE than they do in other browsers. IE has done this correctly, for the most part, for years and does it perfectly in IE7. FF has been threatening to address the issue since early beta, but they can't get past the idea that their (non-sensical) interpretation of the standard is better than the standard itself. Sound familiar? The anti-MS crowd has convinced millions of web developers that IE is the problem here, when in fact they are one of the few who have gotten it right and all that extra work is being caused by the supposed supporters of web standards. Which all goes to show that open source developers are no more or less intellectually arrogant than anyone else.
The vast majority of the rest of "standards compliance issues" are actually failures to enforce standards, not failures to support them, and those will never be addressed by a major browser unless Google releases a version of Mozilla that has standards as its only real priority. Everyone else actually wants their browser to work, and not rendering capitalized tags on XHTML documents or compensating for any of the hundreds of other coding errors web page creators make all the time is probably never going to happen, and for the same reasons that Google has never seriously considered becoming a standards compliant search engine as much as they would like to be one.
As for the reason why IE is hard wired in to Windows, that was clearly stated before the release of Windows 95 and was hailed as a forward thinking adoption of technology at the time - the web browser was the only interface in the Windows GUI. It was, it turns out, not the best idea ever, but the reasons were a lot less malevolent than people want to make them out to be. It wound up being contrary to MS' own internal coding best practices, which stress modularity. It required a hard wired browser in order to support desktop functionality. But that's why IE supports so many proprietary features that other browsers don't, not some Machevellian plan to take over the internet.
But you're right in one regard, IE will never be truly standards compliant as long as Windows relies on it to show you what's on your hard drive, and the other browsers could theoretically achieve standards nirvana (although it would cost them all of their market share because requiring well formed code would break roughly 99% of the web). And MS is unlikely to abandon their practice of leveraging features that are available to Windows users to improve the user experience. Their approach has always been to try to support external standards, but not to only support external standards. At least they get the first half right, which is all that's required in the real world.
It's become way too easy to see MS doing things differently than others and shout "standards compliance!". It happened when they released Active Directory. People rarely step back long enough to see if maybe MS is the only one doing things right, as was the case with AD, the only standards compliant directory service in the world at the time (maybe still). This stems from the misguided notion that standards are established by what the majority are doing, instead of by the bodies charged with doing exactly that.
These arguments are invariably carried on by people with a limited understanding of what standards are and where they come from. Like Sun and Netscape back in the day, and like Opera now. And constant attacks on these grounds hardly encourage MS to make standards a priority, when they get berated no matter what they do.
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Let's be efficient with our efficiency, shall we?
[Read the article: How to get better gas mileage]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Instead of spending 100's of billions of dollars on ever decreasing returns in fuel efficiency and pollution, how about this - spend half that amount on buying every car over 10 years old and recycling them. Good for the environment because cars made in the last 10 years are much more fuel efficient and run much cleaner. Good for the workforce because all those cars will need to be replaced.
Then, since we have decided to do things the right way for a change, we can address over the road trucks. Frighteningly inefficient, crazy dirty, and almost entirely exempt from environmental regulation. And then we can clean up the factories, since automakers are basically prohibitted from doing so now because of the financial demands imposed by having to remove another 1 billionth of a part of pollutant from car emissions when cars already remove many pollutants from the air.
Whew. Really rolling now, huh? How about a law that says no farm can be more than 2,000 acres, so we can return to local farmers growing local produce and delivering it to local consumers? Tons of fuel savings there.
Telecommuting is awesome, and we've had the technology for years (at least 10), but most companies won't do it no matter how many tax incentives we give them. So lets go with a more punative approach. A usage tax for employers that force their employees to use resources unneccessarily. $2500 per year per employee for companies who don't offer telecommuting for admnistrative and information workers, regarless of the size of the company, could be the stick. Tax credits on the purchase of the equipment and training could be the carrot.
Ultimately, none of these things are going to happen because they hold corporate interests accountable for their impact on the environment. But they would cost less and have a lot more impact than the current approach, which is to blame the consumer for everything.