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Anyone
who went through the standards wars that preceded the web wars and had
SGML
browsers before web browsers knows this is the same cycle being repeated.
What
did you learn?
Blood
on the water is what wars always produce. All I am saying is
standards are
what
you make of them. The trend to privatize is almost
irresistable. There is no
protection.
Understand that the web designers were victims of their own making.
Once
they screamed for things to be fixed, kill all the lawyers, down with ISO,
up
with the W3C, we be fast you be slow, and so forth, they simply set the
whole cycle back in motion. The strongest
competitor dominated the outcome. IE
won
because the web designers made it happen. The NS designers lost in
a
competition in which they set the expectations. Why did
NS change their name
from
Mosaic Communications and pay $2.3 million to the University of
Illinois?
What
did they expect from their competitors?
Spy Vs
Spy. Be smart, fast and execute brutally. That is how
evolution usually
works
sans a catastrophe. Dinosaurs beat the mammals every time until the
big
rocks fell from the sky and a lack of food and breathable air gave the
advantage to small, furry, egg-eaters.
"No
good guys, no bad guys, just you and me and we both
disagree."
Again,
what do you require of the organizations you empower?
Do you
want standards police, slow processes for consensus, running code,
what
sort of rule? Choose who chooses your choices. There ain't no
justice beyond that.
Nature
doesn't create law. The mammals do.
If you want a cheerier outlook, see Gandhi. In the long
run, the tyrants
always
fall. Always. But it doesn't happen of
necessity.
Len
http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
Ekam
sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
Anybody who went through the debacle of doing web
design (as opposed to web development) for v4 of IE/NS wouldn't
simply dismiss the desire for agreed upon standards as a need to belong, or a
need to dominate... a lot of Web designers would emphasise a need to go home
and spend time out of the workplace.
There was blood all over the place during that
bowser war... one of the reasons why standards suddenly became so popular
among a section of the audience.
Its easy to forget, and when we do there'll be
blood all over the place again.
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