I don’t know much about web standards but it seems reasonable that any browser vendor with proprietary technology would want to make it a standard.
Look at Apple’s Canvas for an example. Or XmlHttpRequest.
Microsoft has some technology and some ideas that it likes, and wants them to be standardized so everyone else doesn’t re-invent the wheel. This seems like a good thing to propose and your analysis seems overly critical amost to the point of anti-microsoft fanboyism. It’s hard to take this kind of snarky article seriously.
— JoshM 
Hi, Mark. I am having problem with your feed (using bloglines). The last post in that site is “Fuck the foundries”. have you changed something?
— pmarin
JoshM, the quotes from Tony Ross clearly state that Microsoft wants to be able to make up extensions *without* getting them standardized. How did you miss that?
@JoshM: furthermore, the tests linked to from the words “high as a kite” demonstrate that IE’s own behaviour does not in fact conform to the proposal, and neither does any other browser – except, in some respects, when content is served as XHTML, which of course IE does not support. If Microsoft want to standardise the behaviour of their proprietary technologies, they might at least try to standardise on what their technologies actually do.
JoshM,
Sorry to dogpile, but there’s another point that the others missed, which is that even giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt about their role in the web standards process requires completely ignoring the duplicitous way they have approached web standards for years. It requires saying to yourself, essentially, “despite the fact that Microsoft has simultaneously endorsed and flouted the standards process in the past, I believe they will now only endorse rather than flout the standards process.” There isn’t any evidence of this, and Mark has provided evidence to demonstrate they are behaving consistently with their past behavior.
— Trevor
Actually, no, Microsoft doesn’t want to “make up their own extensions without getting them standardized.” It WOULD be nice if developers could use elements rather than having to shoehorn everything into the class attribute.
Hey could you do the same treatment to Hixie’s treatment of anything that he doesn’t like or write? Maybe take some of the text of html5 spec? Something like:
- the portion of HTML5 that says distributed extensibility isn’t allowed
“Only stuff that I make up is allowed” or “I’m high as a kite”
- the rewrite of other specs like svg or aria
“Only stuff that I make up is allowed”
At the very least it’s interesting to see what definitions of and approaches to standardization there are …
> It WOULD be nice if developers could use elements rather than having to shoehorn everything into the class attribute.
Nice for whom? If we adopted that rule, we could never add new elements to the language, ever, for fear of stepping on someone’s existing usage. It’s bad enough now trying to sort out a way to use details/legend/dt/dd.
(Technically speaking, it would mean we could never add new elements *in the HTML namespace*. But adding namespacing to HTML now is essentially impossible to begin with, so that’s essentially the same thing. I’m not sure what problem you’re trying to solve by turning the HTML namespace into a free-for-all.)
— Mark
> Actually, no, Microsoft doesn’t want to “make up their own extensions without getting them standardized.”
If true, this would be a most remarkable change from your behavior of the past 12 years.
— Mark
Thank you for posting here. I know Twitter’s a lot easier to use, but I enjoy your essay-length compositions much more.
Great post! Microsoft never changes – they only disguise better over the time.
Concerning John Gruber, I liked his translation of Adobe FAQ regarding their acquisition of Macromedia much more then Macrovision letter.
— lockoom