Why can't we all just get along???

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Skittlewidth
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Why can't we all just get along???

Post by Skittlewidth »

This could probably go in the client side forum but its more of a general rant so I'll put it here until told otherwise...

I've been looking at the content management tools that the new company I'm working for has developed over the years and the first time I was shown them I was impressed. Very impressed in fact. For one thing directly editing the page seemed very user intuitive. Then the lead developer said "Unfortunately they only work in IE at the moment". (Dare I suggest that this is typical of an ASP/ASP.NET programmer??)

Having always used FCKEditor for my rich text editing needs until now I thought "Well if x is possible in FCK, how hard can it be to make this work in Firefox?" so this week I've been taking a look at the company's CMS source code and now I'm so frustrated with the whole thing I feel like banging my head against the keyboard.

The first problem is that the whole thing is based around "contentEditable = true" - a feature I've not come across before. I've looked into FireFox's DesignMode but that appears to work differently. Then I looked into the functions that were powering the user interface, and most of these were IE only DHTML functions. That lead me to browsing the MSDN DHTML reference which was an eye opening experience for someone who has shyed away from personally doing any major client side scripting for much too long.

Which brings me round to the bit that frustrates me the most. A lot of these Microsoft developed client side functions actually seem really useful and time saving - like showModalDialog, which launches a popup window that maintains focus. Setting "modal=yes" on a normal popup window doesn't seem to work after the second time you click away in Firefox. I know its possible to do, as I say FCKeditor does modal dialogs very well but I bet there was a pretty substantial bit of code involved to accomplish it. (Before you suggest it, I will take a look later)

I guess what I want to know is, why after all this time do we still have this divide between the major browsers? Is it stubbonness from the Open Source community to implement something Microsoft came up with? Is it that the W3C drags it's feet about making something a standard which the OS community is prepared to follow? What's wrong with contentEditable="true" anyway?? (I'm just playing devil's advocate here don't take these as my opinions necessarily!)

I'd finally gotten to grips with writing cross browser compatible CSS and now this Javascript lark has left me all depressed!
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veridicus
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Re: Why can't we all just get along???

Post by veridicus »

Skittlewidth wrote:Is it that the W3C drags it's feet about making something a standard which the OS community is prepared to follow?
I think that's the main culprit. Plus Microsoft often drags its feet following W3C standards anyway. If there's an open standard, OSS will follow it. Firefox implements more of the W3C standards than most other browsers, especially Microsoft. Microsoft has always felt it was in their best interest to have IE specific code out there so people stick with IE. But Firefox has some features which aren't part of any W3C standard (such as XUL, which isn't so bad since it is its own standard others could implement). The whole reason we're able to have AJAX today is because Microsoft created a JavaScript object not part of any standard, and Firefox implemented a matching object.

W3C continues to work on important standards, but they never stay "bleeding-edge". So Microsoft goes off the established path and claims their browser is more advanced. This encourages lock-in like you see with your CMS example.

It's a complex issue. I think it's best to stick with standards.
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Post by feyd »

Modal dialog boxes in most windowing environments is a simple setting in the creation of the window.

The W3 is a consortium, a large body of companies and individuals trying to create a general set of standards. As with any committee, things move slowly, but often very deliberately. The dangerous problem such a system can encounter is losing touch with the community is serves. As an example, for some of us the GPLv3 is one of those possible watershed points.

Microsoft is sort of a wild card with these things. A lot of their ideas are great, but the way they handle them or implement them, especially with respect to other companies is horrible.

As technology becomes more ubiquitous a lot of companies have been seemingly losing touch with their hardcore customers, often looking to generalize out and please the mass market. That may make good business sense, but in alienating customers that often help entrench the very same company can you see it making real sense?
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Ambush Commander
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Post by Ambush Commander »

Actually, W3C is pretty bleeding-edge, (check out the next-gen XSLT or CSS specs). It's just that no one supports those features ;-)
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

Considering the apparent pain to get full compliance for CSS2, I'd say the consortium isn't doing it's job well enough in specing out the rules.
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Ambush Commander
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Post by Ambush Commander »

Agreed. I wonder what would happen if W3C was required to make an implementation of all the things they specced. O.o
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feyd
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Post by feyd »

That would be awesome for all, I'm sure.

I would also imagine it may help them spec out better. :)
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Maugrim_The_Reaper
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Post by Maugrim_The_Reaper »

I guess what I want to know is, why after all this time do we still have this divide between the major browsers? Is it stubbonness from the Open Source community to implement something Microsoft came up with? Is it that the W3C drags it's feet about making something a standard which the OS community is prepared to follow? What's wrong with contentEditable="true" anyway?? (I'm just playing devil's advocate here don't take these as my opinions necessarily!)
AJAX is a sign the open source community can adopt quickly when it proves "useful". Much like use of innerHTML in javascript (another IE innovation which isn't in the standards). The problem is that IE and MS make enough standards departures that few in the open source community who already have a large MS chip on their shoulders and tend to be standards followers anyway are willing to adopt all or even many of them. Also its not like MS own javascript ;). If you think about it, developers are more likely to use Firefox and Linux then any other social group - so IE dominance isn't quite as prevalent in that demographic.

In any case it's in Microsoft's best interests to be different. IE is a bit of a cash cow - as long as it reasonably competitive and most importantly sufficiently standards breaking, it will retain majority market share purely on the back of the thousands of applications that simply will not work under FF, Opera or others, and the hordes of developers who don't want the extra cost of supporting a minority browser. Standards in IE is called "bad news". ;) Maybe FF and co. are shooting themselves in the back in that regard, but since they're open source their market targeting isn't at the same level. If you check out the FF plans for future FF2 and FF3 it's quite an extraordinary list compared to whatever lame gameplan IE has. About the only each shares is OpenID support (Vista for that cardspace interoperability thing, and Mozilla for Firefox 3 as standard). Of course ignoring it might be nuts anyway since you have all those AOL users with OpenIDs now...
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Post by Christopher »

I think you need to remember your history and that fact that there is a monopoly involved. Microsoft destroyed Netscape, but had to build a semi-compatible browser to do it. But they didn't want to be too compatible and have always pushed their own extensions and ActiveX scripting. It is a long, sordid and fairly savage story. Remember, destroying Netscape was the reason that Microsoft was eventually convicted of being a monopoly. That's how ruthlessly important destroying Netscape was to Microsoft. In hindsight that was hopefully the high-water mark for Microsoft.

Given those historically unique circumstances, it is no wonder that the things is a mess. And it is not that technical folks in Microsoft don't contribute good stuff, XMLHTTPRequest is one of many examples. But it really won't be fixed until Microsoft is no longer a monopoly, and non-IE browsers needs another 20%-40% market share before that happens.
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Skittlewidth
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Post by Skittlewidth »

Ah, some good points. I didn't even think about the business logic in developing a browser with non standard features as I was thinking in developer mode rather than in consumer mode.

I'm going to look at http://cross-browser.com and see what I can learn there, - I aim to understand how these things work and not just implement libraries. It might take a while!
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Post by alvinphp »

arborint wrote:But it really won't be fixed until Microsoft is no longer a monopoly, and non-IE browsers needs another 20%-40% market share before that happens.
I don't agree that IE has a monopoly on browsers with the relatively huge success of Firefox. A few years ago you could just build for IE and get away with it because only the super geeks used a non-IE browser. With so many regular users using Firefox though it has become a requirement that your site also works well with Firefox. Microsoft was so aware of this that they came out with IE7 early instead of waiting till Vista was released.
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Post by nickvd »

How can controlling 80+% of the browser market share not be considered a monopoly?
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Ambush Commander
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Post by Ambush Commander »

There is an alternative(s), and it is/they are used by a non-trivial amount of people. Therefore, no monopoly. There was a day when you could code for just IE and hope for the best, that day is (as far as I can see) long gone.
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Post by alvinphp »

nickvd wrote:How can controlling 80+% of the browser market share not be considered a monopoly?
I don't consider 80% a monopoly. They are clearly the leader and have a strong foothold, but it is not enough where Firefox can be ignored.
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Post by alex.barylski »

alvinphp wrote:
nickvd wrote:How can controlling 80+% of the browser market share not be considered a monopoly?
I don't consider 80% a monopoly. They are clearly the leader and have a strong foothold, but it is not enough where Firefox can be ignored.
I wanted to choke when I first read you...so I did quick dictionary.com

Apparently, monopoly is exclusive control over a market, so indeed, they do not have a monopoly.

There are alternatives...

To the OP:

contentEditable is a tag which like (target="_blank") is something of a javascript side functionality...

I was once told (AC or feyd or maybe iamsure can't remember) that W3C was trying to seperate concerns, in which case keeping the contentEditable out of the standard, makes sense :)

Besides, with Dreamweaver the industry standard, it would make more sense to use restricted editing like that of Dreamweaver using specially makred up tags - doesn't break your valid code after all :)

Cheers :)
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