Comments on: Opera and Mandated Standards http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/12/16/opera-and-mandated-standards/ Economics of organizations, strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, and more Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:25:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=MU hourly 1 By: Peter Klein http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/12/16/opera-and-mandated-standards/#comment-64670 Peter Klein Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:46:22 +0000 http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/12/16/opera-and-mandated-standards/#comment-64670 Yes, but the comments in the post refer to processes, or rules, not specific outcomes. Suppose you're right. Then what? The courts, or the Justice Department, or some other regulatory agency should mandate that IE adhere to -- well, to what, exactly? If the government is competent to mandate browser standards, then what other standards should it have control over? Why stop at the browser? What about the rest of the operating system? What about file formats, communications protocols, page layouts, and who knows what else? Who decides what are "techinical" reasons for doing things, and what are "anticompetitive" reasons? Is this something you want a government agency to do? Yes, but the comments in the post refer to processes, or rules, not specific outcomes. Suppose you’re right. Then what? The courts, or the Justice Department, or some other regulatory agency should mandate that IE adhere to — well, to what, exactly? If the government is competent to mandate browser standards, then what other standards should it have control over? Why stop at the browser? What about the rest of the operating system? What about file formats, communications protocols, page layouts, and who knows what else? Who decides what are “techinical” reasons for doing things, and what are “anticompetitive” reasons? Is this something you want a government agency to do?

]]> By: Graeme http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/12/16/opera-and-mandated-standards/#comment-64488 Graeme Sun, 16 Dec 2007 06:33:28 +0000 http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/12/16/opera-and-mandated-standards/#comment-64488 We should not let the markets decide because MS is a monopolist that is using bundling and other tactics (such as co-marketing deals with manufacturers) to distort the market. In most of the discussions I have seen (see some of the comments on the page you link to), developers complain about IE's lack of standards compliance, which creates a lot of extra work. MS's departures from standards are also very often clearly not for technical reasons, but deliberate incompatibility (to increase the costs of supporting all web browsers). Examples include: 1) the border box model, 2) the minor changes that make Silverlight incompatible with SVG: they are so similar that third party fixes can translate on into the other (see http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/05/06/SVG-to-Silverlight-Workbench and http://sanpaku72.blogspot.com/2007/09/having-fun-with-xaml-silverlight-and.html). 3) The failure of IE to accept content served as "application/xhtml+xml", even though it is supposed to support html. Sorry to be so technical, but I cannot make the point properly without doing so. There are plenty of resources on the net that explain the above well. We should not let the markets decide because MS is a monopolist that is using bundling and other tactics (such as co-marketing deals with manufacturers) to distort the market.

In most of the discussions I have seen (see some of the comments on the page you link to), developers complain about IE’s lack of standards compliance, which creates a lot of extra work.

MS’s departures from standards are also very often clearly not for technical reasons, but deliberate incompatibility (to increase the costs of supporting all web browsers). Examples include:

1) the border box model,
2) the minor changes that make Silverlight incompatible with SVG: they are so similar that third party fixes can translate on into the other (see http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/05/06/SVG-to-Silverlight-Workbench and http://sanpaku72.blogspot.com/2007/09/having-fun-with-xaml-silverlight-and.html).
3) The failure of IE to accept content served as “application/xhtml+xml”, even though it is supposed to support html.

Sorry to be so technical, but I cannot make the point properly without doing so. There are plenty of resources on the net that explain the above well.

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