61–70 of 77 posts
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How soon we forget. If TBL hadn't invented the web, we all would have had to wait six months for gopher to come out. Hell, SGML + FTP is practically the same as the web, and that was around for years.
Heh. I knew that whatever example I came up with, someone would come along and bash it.
Say what you want about Microsoft and IE (I'm expecting Microsoft to be bashed as usual in this thread), but for those of us who were developing for the web in the early 2000s IE was way richer in features that any other browser. The event model and the styling capabilities were better and best of all MSDN actually had documentation. There's a reason why IE6 was adopted so much. It "was" good. Others with better idea…
But the only reason MS gave it to us was to destroy Netscape.
Over the years there's no doubt been countless conveniences and innovations that MS could have introduced but didn't. They do just fine without having to share the products of their extensive research. That's the beauty of a monopoly. You do not need to innovate. You only need to keep delivering (just change the version number and some UI stuff) and you need to stifle any competition, early and often.
But those days are slowly coming to an end...
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>Vista's delays didn't do much to entrench IE6. It did in that Microsoft did not originally plan to release an update to ie for Windows XP. The idea was that next gen OS would come with next gen browser. >IE7 was available on XP, and companies just flat out didn't want to upgrade from XP or IE6 ... Do you not think that that has something to do with the fact that there was a 5 year window, in a pivotal time for the i…
People also forget that Microsoft decided to tightly couple their browser to their operating system, not for any technical reason but so that they could fight the antitrust charges levelled by the U.S. DOJ due to their bundling practices and misuse of market power. Consequently, I'm of the opinion that they made a rod for their own back and it became very costly to maintain and enhance their browser. Truly, they were…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Hist...
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Vista's delays didn't do much to entrench IE6. IE7 was available on XP, and companies just flat out didn't want to upgrade from XP or IE6, even though there were more superior options available. Why? Because of the huge amount of legacy code that relied on IE6, and would not run on IE7. Microsoft could have kept in ActiveX support and all the insecure bits that these applications relied on, but instead they did the r…
>Vista's delays didn't do much to entrench IE6. It did in that Microsoft did not originally plan to release an update to ie for Windows XP. The idea was that next gen OS would come with next gen browser. >IE7 was available on XP, and companies just flat out didn't want to upgrade from XP or IE6 ... Do you not think that that has something to do with the fact that there was a 5 year window, in a pivotal time for the i…
The truly frustrating thing was that for most sites (though certainly not all) browser spoofing was all you needed to make them work with Opera... So much rage.
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Opera didn't invent [modern] tabs http://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/opera-did-not...
Even you say Opera did not invent "modern" tabs, so that means they did come up with the precursor. We owe atleast MDI tabs to Opera
Opera's omnibar style implementation is still better than Chrome's (though I stopped using Opera when I switched to OSX, and also webkit still has the best console), and is more useful when trying to re-access history (w/ full text search) and bookmarked sites because they don't gimp the user in an attempt to shunt them to running a search.
Also, while buggy, their text only E-mail client M2 was gmail before gmail existed, in fact the ad-hoc search filters were arguably better. Back when people were jumping on the file/pile train for the first time M2 had already been running it for years.
MS stopped others (Netscape) from innovating. IE only ran on Windows* IE 5 on Mac was crap and maybe antitrust avoiding effort. IE was created at all costs to stop the web browser from becoming an application platform that competed with Windows. MS did everything to keep users from using competing browsers. MS tried to make it impossible to uninstall from Windows. MS tried to keep developers from creating rich applic…
My point was Microsoft advanced and got out in front and won and discouraged the browser market and many web developers. Web applications started to compromise on features.
MS always has/had really great engineers. MSDN is great too.
But we should thank Mozilla developers for overcoming the discouragement and freeing us from that stagnation.
The MS IE team should thank Mozilla and the Chrome team also.
Say what you want about Microsoft and IE (I'm expecting Microsoft to be bashed as usual in this thread), but for those of us who were developing for the web in the early 2000s IE was way richer in features that any other browser. The event model and the styling capabilities were better and best of all MSDN actually had documentation. There's a reason why IE6 was adopted so much. It "was" good. Others with better idea…
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There's a big downside here too: by publishing lots of very big and crufty (and ill-thought out) API's, they make it very hard to come up with alternate implementations. And once devs are locked into those API's, it's very very hard to port things to a different engine. So you might respect XmlHttpRequest, but it's also a fairly small API in comparison to some of the other things MS produced. And it's _those_ things…
that is how things are developed though, people ship them and they become standards or die. it wasn't just Microsoft, Andreessen invented the image tag by simply shipping it in Mosaic: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.hypertext/fMl2xRqL... TBL was against it, as were others. If he went through the theoretical 'standards' process that you infer is the 'right way' it never would have got done I am definitely o…
From the WHAT-WG FAQ:
"The WHATWG was founded by individuals of Apple, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software in 2004, after a W3C workshop. Apple, Mozilla and Opera were becoming increasingly concerned about the W3C’s direction with XHTML, lack of interest in HTML and apparent disregard for the needs of real-world authors. So, in response, these organisations set out with a mission to address these concerns and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group was born."
Say what you want about Microsoft and IE (I'm expecting Microsoft to be bashed as usual in this thread), but for those of us who were developing for the web in the early 2000s IE was way richer in features that any other browser. The event model and the styling capabilities were better and best of all MSDN actually had documentation. There's a reason why IE6 was adopted so much. It "was" good. Others with better idea…
Story time:
IE3 and NN3 both had small amounts of programmability via JavaScript - you could change the src of an image, you could inspect and modify form values, you could navigate the page, or completely clear its contents and rewrite it as a string. Oh, and also alert(), confirm(), and prompt().
IE4 and NN4 came out at roughly the same time. But in IE4, they took this idea of small amounts of programmability, and generalized it to the entire document. IE4 introduced the idea that every HTML node should be programmable and interactive in a generalized way. If you knew the HTML properties for an element, you already knew its programmatic interface. It was a simple, powerful idea that hasn't been improved dramatically since.
NN4, on the other hand, introduced this ridiculous hack called 'layers'. You could create these floating layers, and write into them using document.write(). That was the only dynamic mechanism in NN4 above what NN3 had.
So IE4 introduced a powerful and simple generalization of the platform, and NN4 introduced an ugly hack. Surprisingly, developers preferred IE. On top of that IE4, was rock solid and NN4 was crashy.
It's true that Microsoft abused their monolopy position, but the part of the story everyone forgets is that they also more or less invented the modern web in IE4.
Sorry.
Say what you want about Microsoft and IE (I'm expecting Microsoft to be bashed as usual in this thread), but for those of us who were developing for the web in the early 2000s IE was way richer in features that any other browser. The event model and the styling capabilities were better and best of all MSDN actually had documentation. There's a reason why IE6 was adopted so much. It "was" good. Others with better idea…
IE6 was actually just an incremental improvement on IE5 and IE4 before it. IE4 was the really important leap. Story time: IE3 and NN3 both had small amounts of programmability via JavaScript - you could change the src of an image, you could inspect and modify form values, you could navigate the page, or completely clear its contents and rewrite it as a string. Oh, and also alert(), confirm(), and prompt(). IE4 and NN…