Re: Industry Standard's Net 21
Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Thu, 24 Jun 1999 17:52:11 -0400 (EDT)
Ka-Ping Yee writes:
> If they were going to implement this stuff and make it big, at least
> they could have done it with the tiniest bit of *competence*.
>
> And in that i include both engineering competence and design
> competence. With each new version of their software Netscape is
> working hard to achieve near-Microsoft crash rates (a remarkable
> accomplishment in itself).
>
> As for the design side of things, i think they were reckless with
> a standard (ad-hoc or otherwise) they *knew* was going to affect
> millions upon millions of people. They had a big responsibility
> to do things right -- or even *halfway* intelligently -- and yet
> they didn't even take the time to think about their design mistakes
> before unleashing them on the world.
Agreed on all points, though I'd put some of that down to a justified
fear of Microsoft (and the consequent rush to beat them to market),
and a lot of it to sheer inexperience.
Which makes it all the more regrettable that the people with serious
experience in document-markup design were making themselves impossible
to work with, by literally refusing to acknowledge that HTML, as a
lowest-common-denominator distribution format for end users, was
simply solving a different problem than their beloved high-end SGML
document repositories...
rst