| > Microsoft didn't replace some standard with a subtly different standard when they did ActiveX and VBScript... what was the standard you claim existed that they were ring subtly different from? JavaScript? Java? (Again: not a standard.) I agree. I called out ActiveX and VBScript as not being examples of this because I thought somebody might bring them up if I didn't. I don't think those really contributed much to IE's poor reputation on standards. You list some of the examples I was thinking of later on. > You also claim that Microsoft stopped working on IE6 when they obtained dominance: I directly touch on that in my expanded comments, pointing out that it makes more sense that Microsoft stopped working on IE when they ran into legal opposition and the project became demoralizing and dangerous. Microsoft does not have a history of simply not releasing updates to products they have dominated: their updates are at times problematic to others and sometimes even self-defeating, but something really weird happened with IE6--where there was only a single service pack release during a nearly five year hiatus from any form of update--that simply isn't well-explained by their dominance. I'm not sure if you think I claimed otherwise, but I didn't. The reason for Microsoft's stagnation wasn't relevant to my point, so I didn't address it. Remember: The purpose of my comment was not to slag Microsoft. The purpose of my comment was just to illustrate that making progress was not what got Microsoft its bad reputation for web standards. Why Microsoft did things is interesting (and I think you're probably right), but it's beside the point when we're just asking "What did Microsoft do?" > Finally, now in this comment you talk about "broke the standards": I would appreciate some citations and examples; the primary things I know that people like to argue about are issues with CSS and XSL/T that are entirely explained by "pushing proto-standard"... the IE box model being the prototypical example. CSS was still newly finalized when IE released support, but I don't believe there was ever a draft specifying the behavior IE used. Here's a draft from a year before IE 3 that specifies the standard box model: http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-css1-951117.html#horiz I can't find any evidence that Microsoft had reason to believe the behavior they implemented was what would be in CSS. As far as I can determine, they simply diverged from the spec. Maybe they misread the spec, maybe they liked their model better and chose to ignore the CSS standard they had available to them — and I mean, hey, I liked their version better too — but the fact is that they just created a competing standard and were reluctant to adopt the real standard, and this caused people to feel that Microsoft had poor support for standards. |