

Joel is from Mars, browsers are from Venus - muriithi
http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/show.dml/1818385

======
pmjordan
This is a rebuttal-ish article in response to this article from yesterday:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=138997>

I haven't been following the HTML5 effort, but I find it very encouraging to
hear that there will be reference implementations for it. This Opera developer
seems to imply that the IE team are collaborating on this effort, which I find
even more encouraging, although I hope MS aren't playing their old underhanded
"hostile cooperation" tricks here.

I think all the outcry over IE8 is probably going to turn out to be a non-
issue when the final release is out eventually. It's prerelease software.
Seriously, calm down. I don't think the IE team are doing themselves any
favours releasing something this early, especially given the amount of
negative feelings against previous versions of IE.

Recent versions of IE have been steps in the right direction. MS might be
learning to play nice after all. Let's wait and see what the software is like
closer to final release. And Joel should probably do a bit more research (re:
HTML5, etc.) before trying to make a point.

Possible bias: I use Opera on Linux.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I haven't been following the HTML5 effort_

Neither has anyone. The HTML standard has been dormant for seven or eight
years. That's nearly a lifetime ago. (Literally -- at Drupalcon we had a
lecture on jQuery from a twelve-year-old.) The web standards folks are like
the anti-DHH: Their development cycle is "release late and infrequently". We
all fell asleep a long time ago, waiting for these guys to actually _release
something we can use_.

Admittedly, the endless delay is not the standardistas' fault. The elephant in
the room is that you can't really make progress in Web standards by refining
the standards: They're not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is getting MS to
conform to the standard, and you could interpret the last eight years as a
long struggle to construct a critical mass of standards-compliant browsers and
pages, such that MS has no choice but to take notice. It's been an epic
battle, akin to Stallman's effort to construct a free operating system from
scratch, so it took a while. But the battle seems to be getting won, thank
god.

And I'm happy to read the occasional cheerful article, like this one, which
assures me that the future is looking good, and that everyone is finally ready
to join hands and sing. But then I have to go back to work, every day, and
remind myself of how broken the standards are as I struggle to port designs to
IE. The optimism wears off quickly. This damned broken browser apparently has
an 80% market share, so I have no choice. It's like trying to change tires
with your teeth, I have to do it _every single week_ , and it makes me
_royally pissed_.

And that's why I like Joel's article. No, he doesn't see things from the
perspective of an optimistic member of the HTML5 team. He sees things from
_my_ perspective, from the outside, where the situation _sucks_ and _has
sucked for nearly a decade_ and where an honest extrapolation predicts
_further suckage_ despite all the sunny promises. I'm not going to credit
Microsoft and the HTML5 team with a solution to this problem until the
solution has shipped and has significant marketshare, because I'm in pain, and
help has been on the way for a very, very long time.

------
Tichy
I am with Joel, I don't think it is realistically possible to make an
unambiguous specification.

