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RE: Alternatives to the W3C

• From: "Didier PH Martin" <martind@n...>
• To: "Tim Bray" <tbray@t...>, "Don Park" <donpark@d...>, "'XML Dev'" <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 20:03:48 -0500

HI Tim,

Tim said:
Maybe I'm old-fashioned; I believe passionately that the Internet needs for
there to be more than one browser.  -T.

Didier replies:
Me too Tim. But I have to admit that the landscape is not very promising to
get more than one.

a) Netscape is no more pursuing the innovation war that they where doing and
if you look closely to the Netscape Browser and IE, it is clear that one is
evolving and the other is stagnant. On the side of Mozilla, the development
time is bigger than expected but the feature set interesting. It remains now
to see, if this could be brought to the market (I hope with all my hart that
it will).

b) W3C by having different style languages like XSLT/XSL, CSS just increased
the cost of development and thus created a huge barrier of entry for any new
competitor. This, W3C created a barrier of entry for newcomers and only
corporation with a lot of resources can make it.

c) Now the Web as it became main stream is becoming more and more resistant
to change and the player in place share the pie. Again, the market dynamics
make it hard for newcomers.

And so on and so forth...

So, even if me too I would passionately believe that more than one browser
should be there and that competition drives innovation. But I have to admit
that several forces and some of them created by W3C just make the opposite
effect, to favor big guys with deep pockets and impose more and more
barriers of entries to newcomers.

PS: the spellchecker joke of the week. The Outlook spellchecker wants always
to replace the word W3C by WACO :-)))

Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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    • From: steve@r... (Stephen R. Savitzky)

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    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

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