New browser war: Microsoft versus the W3C

[Guest guest]

June 10, 2004

 

Why Microsoft Really Hates The Web

 

Technology Support

 

 

" The new browser war may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla

and friends with their polished eye-candy interfaces, but it's really

about Microsoft versus the W3C.

 

Internet Explorer is Microsoft's blocking tactic—never to be properly

web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun—and Longhorn

technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the

purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it.

 

The web is used to provide a variety of services and communities.

Part of the Longhorn strategy is to extract from the web all of the

services with any profit model at all: web magazines, auction sites,

news, online retailers, and so on. ... It's the presence of

standardized data in web content—whether current standards such as

XHTML or some yet-unknown future standards, perhaps based on XUL—

guaranteeing that the web will remain a global commons, an

information highway, and a free marketplace.

 

The alternative is a corporate Diaspora and a tollway. Organizations

must wake up to the value of open and manageable standards-based web

data, and cease being stupefied by irrelevant popularity arguments.

Standardizing data should not be an act of penance; it should be

about sustaining communities and markets—ones from which service

agendas and profits derive.

 

If organizations don't see the web as a useful global commons into

which they can deliver their services, that global commons will

vanish as a community and as a marketplace. In this new war,

individual action is still important, so choose a standard compliant

browser if you value the web, or if your job earns value from it. "

 

This is the last section of a six-part article by Nigle McFarlane

which has been circling the news for a good number of days now. If

you want to really understand why standards are key to the

development and evolution of the Web, this essay is a must read.

 

Nigel McFarlane - informIT -- Reference