molly.com

Friday 11 February 2005

hakon gets hot

HAKON GETS HOT and tells Bill Gates what’s what about interoperability. The article, Opera to MS: Get real about interoperability, Mr Gates must be read by every web developer and standards geek. Now.

Filed under:   general
Posted by:   Molly | 12:00 | Comments (15)

Comments (15)

  1. I almost spewed coffee at the “Port IE/Mac to Windows” suggestion (passable advice, until you try to do any DOM scripting whatsoever), but the rest is spot on.

  2. *resetting cookie, noting to see here, move on*

  3. Bloke who runs dying browser gets grumpy with zillionaire monopolist. Film at 11.

  4. That “bloke who runs dying browser” is on a weekly W3C working group call with another bloke who represents “zillionaire monopolist.” They usually work together extremely well in trying to hone the next round of CSS specifications. Next week’s call ought to be really interesting!

  5. I am continually mystified at Microsoft’s laziness with IE. In many ways this is their flagship product. People who don’t even own Office still run IE. You would think MS would go all out to make this the best product possible. They shouldn’t be complacent because everyone has it, they should be leaping at the opportunity to use it as a demonstration of how good a Microsoft product can be. Unfortunately, it is such a demonstration, but not a positive one.

  6. Funny that this bloke rants about unsopperted standards compability in IE while his own browser until recently sucked so much. I don’t know how many flame mails I got from upset Opera power users who learned through a disclaimer on commercial sites I created that their browser is *not* the best in the world, that it does *not* support web standards by 100% and therefore there will be display errors and functions that simply don’t work in Opera. I might remember for example that getElementsByTagName() didn’t work for a very long time. Still standards support lacks in a lot of areas, especially in DOM 2: see http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/ for a list. Forget Opera, get Firefox!

  7. I’m curious why this article is so revolutionary. Aside from an item or two, many of those issues are well-known and rehashed several times by capable people. The article didn’t seem particularly insightful, or even funny.

    Do we hate Microsoft so much that someone can gain notoriety just by complaining about them on the web? I’m not sure why this article was a must read.

  8. Phil: I think the notion of someone who works on a competing browser are using well known points to attack Microsoft in a public article. I agree with other commenters too, they should worry about fixing up their own browser before attacking Microsoft, and whining that Firefox got the limelight and they didn’t.

    When I design a site using Firefox as the test platform, I expect Opera to display the site the same as Firefox. Sadly that is not the case. Once their browser does as much, then they should worry about the competition.

  9. If you only know Hakon as being related to the Opera browser, you need to read your Web history. Maybe those here having trouble seeing my point will get the irony on the grander scale once they find out what else he’s known for.

    That not-so-small issue aside, yes, the Opera browser is far from perfect. But Opera has worked extremely hard to correct its poor DOM implementation, and has long been the one browser paying attention to CSS implementation consistently. Like I said, read your Web history. And, Opera is the one browser company moving aggressively into the mobile and alternative device spaces. Markup folks have been talking about that as an ideal for years, Opera is actually doing the hard work of manifesting that vision.

  10. Oh, I don’t really care about any pot-calling-the-kettle-black issues (or lack thereof); I just didn’t see what was so informative about the article. But if was posted for irony value then, yes, that would be my problem for not getting it. 😉 Molly, do you have a resource you could point me to so I could find out what in this person’s history makes this article ironic?

    I’m relieved to find out that this wasn’t an example of When Technorati Complain About Something We Should All Be Impressed Even If They Aren’t Saying Anything Helpful. I should have known better, oh me of little faith.

  11. That’s right Phil – you should feel duly chastized 😉

    Try a search on Hakon Lie on Google. You might see him referred to as various things, one of them will be “Inventor of CSS.”

  12. *slinks back into kennel*

    😉

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