It's not the extending of things like CSS that bothers me. If that didn't happen, these standards would never progress forward.
It doesn't bother me about the ambiguous parts of the CSS standard. What happens there is, it's implemented in Gecko one way, and then implemented in IE another way, and if the IE implementation makes as much or more sense than the Mozilla one, they say 'sorry, guys, this could cause breakage,' and change it to be compatible with IE, because they know Microsoft won't change theirs.
What I don't like, is the various places where I look at the unambiguous pieces of, say, CSS, and implementing it according to how I interpret it, which should be the same way everyone else does, and lo and behold, it works in Mozilla. Then, when I have the opportunity, I pull the same page up in IE and it *doesn't work*. Microsoft's explanation? "We've always done it this way, and don't want to change."
If the Mozilla foundation went with that kind of thought, people would still have to use LAYER tags as well as DIVs, use two entirely different tags for styling, and essentially have {n: n > 1} versions of every page. Thank Netscape for 4.7 that supported a subset of the de-facto IE styling that seemed to be winning, because fortunately they could still see that standards were neccessary.
And then W3 comes along and changes things so they make more sense, and Microsoft won't modify their browser to fit.
That's what bothers me. |
