Standards or chaos?
by Allan Mertner | 18 Mar 2008 | Permalink |
Software, Web 2.0
Joel Spolsky recently posted another great article where he at great length and in his usual amusing fashion describes the problems the Internet Explorer 8 team faced in deciding whether or not to adopt an idealistic or a pragmatic view of the world.
The bottom line is that while complying with standards is a good thing, in practice it is impossible to do because standards are hard to understand, subject to interpretation, and usually don’t have a bulletproof reference implementation to test against. And because of this, it is necessary to take a pragmatic view of the world and just do the best you can. If IE8 ships without realizing this, the world will certainly continue to be dominated by Firefox and IE7…
What do you think? Is the pragmatic but flawed approach the right one, or should we try to slow down the pace of innovation and change to allow a more careful and more interoperable world to emerge? Personally, I’m with the pragmatists, every time.
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