[FSF India] MS-HTML pollution

[Vivekananda Prabhu]

Hi,

Apropos MS-HTML related posting by Ramakrishnan M( I
am in the digest mode & cannot reply to individual
postings. Copy pasting one message out of 5-6 is
really messy)

Yes, MS-HTML has been polluting us since years even
before "Halloween" documents. It is not a recent M$
strategy. This strategy is not restricted to character
encoding, they have introduced custom tags like
MARQUEE, made custom extensions to W3C HTML DOM model,
custom extensions to CSS... The list is endless

But what can we do? Can we sue M$? No because "HTML"
is not a trademark of IETF or W3C. Anybody can claim
their browser to support HTML without any
certification & no one can do anything about it. (As
an aside the story was different on the "Java(TM)"
front)

In addition to "MS-HTML" there is also a lot of
"NS-HTML" lying around. M$ is not the only one to
pollute HTML, N$ didn't try any lesser. (Blink tag,
netscape DOM etc).I believe atleast around 70%-80% of
the WWW is polluted with MS-HTML & NS-HTML.

Who will clean up the mess? Why will the
companies/individuals bother when IE is the dominant
browser (used by more than 65-70% of surfers)?. There
are also 14% NS-HTML Netscape 4.x users around

They will not bother unless a standards compliant
"Free Browser" becomes *the* popular browser replacing
IE & NS 4.x

Let us assume that "Free Browser" has become
production-ready & users start to browse the web with
it (testing waters). Suddenly they see most of their
favourite web-sites appearing as "Junk" & nothing
seems to work. They will mostly think of it to be
"Free Browser" bugs & switch back to IE ( Don't expect
the popular press to to go after M$ when they get a
signifant part of their revenue from "Where do you go
today?" ads)

The only solution to this mess is to *some how* make
"Free Browser" the most popular browser (so that
people start writing standard HTML). This will be a
slow process & will take a long time. Till that time
most of this pseudo-HTML will lying around

For this (user acceptance) to happen our "Free
Browser" has to be dummy-safe. It has to support "IE"
& "NS 4.x" compatiblity modes (where you can use
"demoronizer" or any other technique) till this
"garbage" can be cleared out. In case users come
across pseudo-HTML they can switch to these other
non-default modes.

We also need to educate the people on the importance
of standards & Free Software. This is required so that
people don't buy-in for "IE for Linux" if M$ feels
compelled to release it free (gratis) to extinguish
our "Free Browser"

Regards,
Vivek




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