jackc said:
The argument is that since IE dominates browser share, that's bad news for everyone else. Is this something to be concerned about, or will most web developers stick to the more compatible standards?
microsoft is the single largest threat to the internet. this is definitely reason for concern. unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of web designers sticking to standards, most of them buy "GoLive for dummies" and think they can build a website. others only design for IE, because it's the most popular (also the least compliant). just look at all of the sites out there that turn you away if you aren't using IE. it's only going to get worse, as longhorn/avalon/.net and microsoft's non-compliant svg variant will essentially try to replace the w3c standards with proprietary ones. and guess what, businesses will design only for the "microsoft internet", because that's what 90% of people use, and the business has to make money. this is why mozilla and gnome are trying to combine forces before longhorn hits shelves - hopefully providing an alternative before the flack bomb explodes. when longhorn ships (which is what, 2014 now?), you're going to see a lot of enterprises pay unholy amounts to "upgrade" to the "latest and greatest", and there are going to be databases, bank websites, interactive content, etc. that will
only run in longhorn because they're based on avalon/IE/microsoftsvg/etc and if you use something else, well, "sorry, but we only support IE".
think about how much of an ordeal to read a complex word file without word (if you can). now imagine if that was every website you visited. that's why this is a problem.
i think apple needs to expand on the sherlock/xquery apis to provide a similar solution on osx. in fact, a cross-platform solution could be created, just think of the potential that exists with things like
renaissance (gnustep/cocoa interfaces described in xml) and
StepTalk (scripting for GNUstep). these could be embedded within webkit to make a system that runs on mac, linux, and windows controling
native objects, classes and interfaces, not just app-specific solutions. or, apple could just adopt xul. all open source, all cross-platform.