| |||||||||||||
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communitiesPaoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communitiesPosted Apr 14, 2012 9:27 UTC (Sat) by rwst (guest, #84121)In reply to: Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities by flammon Parent article: Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities
Agreed, just look at how they treated SVG. Then, finally what, a plug-in? The Web could be full of enlargable illustrations and animations, by now. It really hurts to see such waste.
(Log in to post comments)
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 14, 2012 11:28 UTC (Sat) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
> Agreed, just look at how they treated SVG. Then, finally what, a plug-in?
Huh? They do have native SVG support now. (IE9+)
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 14, 2012 16:36 UTC (Sat) by rwst (guest, #84121) [Link]
Tell me: if you were one of the many who write web pages for other people, and you ask your contractor, may I use SVG... but your readers -- if they have IE 8 or less -- will have to install a plugin. What will the average contractor answer? "I can see the benefits, but IE9 will not dominate the next years. So, no."
It is improbable that with so many bright people at MS noone would have pointed out the consequences of their action: the Web twenty years without that SVG.
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 14, 2012 17:34 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It is improbable that with so many bright people at MS noone would have pointed out the consequences of their action: the Web twenty years without that SVG. As far as Microsoft is concerned it's not their fault: they've supported VML for years. The fact that other browsers refuses to support it means it's not their problem. Microsoft always considered standards as one-way street: Microsoft sets them, other use them. VML and OOXML fit this scheme perfectly but the fact that IE9 finally adds SVG support shows some promise. Or course it's only small hint of promise: it's not easy to convince others that you now are serious about standardization process after so many years of abuse. The fact that Microsoft still does not support such a simple thing as
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 15, 2012 2:05 UTC (Sun) by nas (subscriber, #17) [Link]
PNG transparency is another example. How many years did that take? There is lots of other examples.
Regarding SVG, how is it possible that Office products (Word, Powerpoint), still (at least, last I checked) don't have a decent vector format they can import? Windows Metafile (WMF) does not work. It just seems insane to me that a company the size of Microsoft could not provide a single working vector format import for the document products. Anyone who has had to deal with Word for technical documents has probably felt the pain. How many person-years trying to work around that brain-damage?
Microsoft has screwed up interoperability for nearly their entire existence. From the outside, it looked fairly clear that some of that was intentional, generally to harm competition. Now people are slowly moving away from Office and other Microsoft software and they announce (again) how they are going to play nice? Sorry, but as an open source developer I don't believe or trust them.
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 16, 2012 3:11 UTC (Mon) by dpquigl (subscriber, #52852) [Link]
Microsoft didn't support inttypes and stdint because those are C99 features. Their compiler is only C89 compliant. Once you start patch working in only part of the standard things get murky.
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 16, 2012 8:57 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Microsoft didn't support inttypes and stdint because those are C99 features. Nope. They are listed in addenum D in the list of 25 headers provided by C++11 for compatibility with C. And Microsoft talks big about his dedication to C++11. Once you start patch working in only part of the standard things get murky. Indeed. Does not mean you should drag your feet and include only features which don't help portability. Note that
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 16, 2012 9:47 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I don't really understand the matter of 'inttypes.h'. Most libraries had some kind of compat typedefs behind #ifdefs for _ages_.
Having a standard header would just mean a bit fewer compat typedefs, that's all.
It's so minor that I haven't even realized it's a problem for anybody.
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 16, 2012 10:23 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I don't really understand the matter of 'inttypes.h'. No? Rilly? Most libraries had some kind of compat typedefs behind #ifdefs for _ages_. And these definition are sometimes incorrect and sometimes conflict (if you want to use two such libraries), they must be included in all the new projects, too. IOW: it PITA. Small one, but still a PITA. The same as the lack of support for “z”, “t”, “ll” (along with Having a standard header would just mean a bit fewer compat typedefs, that's all. Well, that's the whole purpose of standards, right? You can support anything without them by using bunch of ifdefs (runtime checks in case of dynamic languages like JavaScript). Just like you can deal with VML/SVG split by using something like Raphaël. It's so minor that I haven't even realized it's a problem for anybody. Well, it's minor, I'll grant you that. Still cumulative time spent because of it is measured in years: each particular project spent day or so fighting it, but most projects are affected. In a sense it's symbol: Microsoft could easily add these headers (few days of work of a single person), yet it stalls for years. If it feels that it's beneigh its dignity to implement such a simple, much requested things (take a look here, for example) then what hope is there for something more complex? Microsoft participates in standards activity in the hope that everyone else will implement these standards. But as Microsoft is concerned standards most definitely don't apply to Microsoft in any shape or form… sure, if some standard is implemented exactly as Microsoft is envisioned it then it'll be standards compliant, if it's changed (like happened with SVG or OOXML) then, oh well, it's not Microsoft's problem. Other companies and people understand that standards are not the goal in itself, they are means to the other goal: to make interoperability possible. Microsoft understands that, too, and explicitly refuses to cooperate. For Microsoft standards are all about PR: some people at the bottom may foolishly work with standards as any other company but if they become too successful then guys from the top interfere and stop such activity.
Paoli: Microsoft will engage with the open source and standards communities Posted Apr 15, 2012 9:07 UTC (Sun) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
The problem isn't really "people using IE8 or less" but that IE9 does not work on XP so IE users on XP can't use it.
As for MS the situation is at least improving now.
|
|||||||||||||