If my television license fee goes towards the development of content (whether or not I choose to *watch* the content), then why do I have to pay *again* to get this content on a DVD? Surely the price of the DVD should just reflect the cost price of DVD production and distribution, as I have already paid for the content via my license fee?
This strikes me as a continuation of those ‘Best viewed in $browsername $version’ badges, that irritate me beyond all measure.
I will use what version and what browser I choose, to consume your content. If I choose to have the text chiselled out onto the back of a passing badger, that is *my* choice.
At the moment I’m suffering my way through an enormous web application, targetted at IE7 only (as it’s an intranet application and we are currently using IE7), but I would not dream of testing only in IE7, as I realise that time progresses (shocking, I know), and as IE crawls more and more towards standards compliance, I’m hoping that one day the playing field will be level enough for me not to have to test in n+1 browsers. Things looked fine in IE7 that looked skewiff in Safari3, which told me I’d got something wrong. I don’t want to be lied to by a browser, so being tied to IE7 forever sounds like my idea of hell.
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if IE8 went for ‘latest-version’ by default. That way, things can progress naturally. I *can* see the appeal of being able to specify IE7 mode if you have to (if you’ve hacked together something terrible in a hurry and can’t fix it before they rush out IE8 asap) to buy you a little more breathing time if it looks like trolls toenails in IE8. But we don’t want to get stuck in 2006, do we?
What saddens me most is the fact that it seems to be tearing the webdev community apart. There are some quite personal attacks going on and it’s sad to see WaSP eating itself. I’m sure it will sort itself out, we’re all adults.
I think the real problem is not necessarily the browser developers, it’s the web developers themselves. WaSP and co. are more or less a tiny minority of idealists (I’m not knocking idealism, I suffer terribly myself). Most web developers are cowboys. Yes, sweeping generalisation, but if you look at the majority of sites you get a good idea of the level of standards-awareness that there is out there. And yet, that’s not necessarily the fault of the developers either. I was consulted on a web project and mentioned accessibility. I got the response of ‘but who enforces that, do we have to do it?’ from the person commissioning the site. With attitudes like that, there is no real incentive to push for standards compliance in projects. It’s always quicker to cut corners and knock something together that displays and behaves okay in IE6 and doesn’t suck too much in IE7. Gets the job done, doesn’t it?
Have depressed myself with that, I always find it delightful to discover that some people *do* actually care about doing things properly and cleanly. I evangelise about nice clean code, use of CSS, maintainability, accessibility and basic sanity, but sometimes I feel like Scary Bag-lady haranguing passers-by.
What the web standards community *really* needs to do is to reach out a bit more, beyond the elite crowd, to the bums-on-seats level of web developer. Enthuse and fire these people with your message, get corporate penetration with the benefits of standards compliance - make it a *standard* approach to web development.
Only then, can we win the browser war.
My Optio T20 went sadly blind (camera functional but all it could see was black) so after an attempt to use my Optio s4 again, I wanted something with a bigger LCD. Spoilt? Moi? So I bought a Panasonic DMC-TZ3. The first picture I took was of our television setup (just because I find it amusing).
The television is an aging Sony Trinitron thing that belonged to my late grandmother. The Mac Mini is shiny and new. The magic is the EyeTV DTT stick thing which allows the Mac Mini to do wondrous things and record all the TV I never remember to watch.
