Gerhard Fiedler <lists <at> connectionbrazil.com> writes:
> Also, think about defining the boundaries. Would it be legal to have
> something non-w3c compliant on my private LAN? On a company LAN? On the

The key is to understand that you cannot publically give
away/market/show/sell/allow to be consumed something that is marked, say 'milk',
but contains water and white paint, because that could lead to bad things
happening. Nobody really cares if one peddles 'white water, do not drink' but if
the white water is labelled 'milk' then things are different. Web and file
format standards are the similar. One cannot label a page 'text/html' if it can
contain markup that is not rendered by some browsers because a certain large
company decided to embrace and extend the standard, with the result that, say, a
pharmacy selling some drug online puts up a special warning label with regards
to drug incompatibility for a product, and that is simply not rendered by the
user's browser, with a few people ending up in hospital every month because of
that. Similar things apply to Javascript and DHTML (the first is used to
generate the latter).

Then there is the issue of defining what is milk and what is not milk. In some
languages there are 'milk' varieties which are not milk at all (f.ex. in German
'Kalkmilch' - that's diluted slacked lime - lime milk in English - ouch). So far
the HTML 'milk' definition is pretty well handled by w3c and whoever implements
browsers and content generators had better abide by its standards before someone
ends up in hospital or dead, or books a $1 flight with $900 intaxes around the
world instead of to the next city because the fine print rendered in pretty
incompatible DHTML markup did not show up in his browser. And my heart really
bleeds for the 'proprietary browser extension makers' who will eventually have
to stop doing that and get with the program (note that there is no prohibition
for making their own protocols - just leave the public protocols alone, please,
and stop *mislabeling* incompatible 'embraced and extended' pages as 'html' - it
is that mislabeling that should be outlawed or strongly discouraged).

There are enough big name sites that prove day by day that multimedia content
can be created to be platform-independent. I was just looking at the Maple Leafs
website yesterday and I could use all the media features fine using 'non
Micorsoft tools', and there are thousands of examples. So it can be done.

Peter


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