Re: lynx-dev web standards (fwd)

[David Woolley]

Laura quoted:
> 
> > From address@hidden Sun Aug  9 13:50:09 1998
> > Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998 12:36:04 -0500
> > Subject: New Web Standards Advocacy Project
> >
> >
> >
> >      A group of high=96profile Web designers is forming a
                        ^^^
Proprietory character - not a good sign.  The MIME headers haven't
survived, but the only valid ISO 8859-1 printable characters are
=20 to =7E and =A0 to =FF.

> >
> >      coalition to protest the differing standards between
> >
> >      Microsoft's and Netscape's browsers.=20

As I understand this, this is the purpose of W3C.  For the same reasons
that they have become strongly influenced by one of the major players,
I would say that the new body will have no muscle.  Basically, although
standards help the little people, it is only the big players who have the
resources to get anything done on standards, so they end up dominating
the process; if the people forming the new body are not able to actually
work through the W3C, I doubt that they will have the resources to have
much impact.

The other big problem with this piece is that nowhere is the phrase
"competitive edge" used.  As big players, Netscape and Microsoft's
commercial people will be continually demanding that their design people
maintain a competitive edge, and this generally means that they offer
features that the other one does not.  Only small players can afford to
base a business on strict compliance with standards, and even this is
difficult as the standards are adjusted to match the implementations by
the big players.  Unless some alternative way of maintaining competitive
edge can be demonstrated, there is no way that the Microsoft and Netscape
commercial people will fall in line with this campaign.

This has been the way of life for telecoms standards for decades, if
not since the birth of modern telecoms.

Something else that needs to be remembered is that the real market for
browsers is probably the intranet, where it will be normal to select
just one product.  About the only direct revenue that comes out of mass
market sites is for the authoring tools.

From a Lynx point of view, none of this is probably helpful, as the 
designers sound like they are trying to push the envelope in terms of
graphical gimmicks, not produce pages which work well with all browsers.