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Opera Claims Microsoft Has Poor Interoperability
Noksagt writes "Opera CTO Hakon Lie has countered the claims that Bill Gates made regarding Microsoft's superior interoperability last week. He points out their invalid webpages, MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format, and more." From the article: "You say you believe in interoperability. Why then, did you terminate the Web Core Fonts initiative you started in 1996? You deserve credit for starting it, but why close down a project which could have given you yet much good will? (Verdana sucks, but Georgia is beautiful!)"
Maybe verdana does suck, but reading serif fonts on a computer screen causes a lot more eye strain than reading sans serif fonts. Of course, serif fonts like Georgia look good on paper, but on a computer screen, I think sans-serif fonts are much better.
That is simply not true. From a customer perspective, I would rather have one good proprietary solution that serves my needs than a dozen mediocre but interoperable ones. I only need one at once!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"thats why proprietary software is bad. there is no way for the consumer to benefit from the software."
It's also why ambiguous standards are bad. Anybody else read the little blurb a few years ago about how no browser (Netscape, IE, etc....) passed the standards test completely?
"Derp de derp."
It was previously commented that Microsoft is going down the tubes because of several factors, like IE not being updated in years (except for security patches), and Longhorn being way late. This is just another example. The smell of rot from the direction of Redmond is getting stronger.
I'm quite frustrated when people hardcode in fonts - even linuxsites code in font's that really look awful on a (my, at least :p) linux system. Use the css attribute font-family: sans-serif instead of font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif! Then we (who actually browse the pages) can choose our favourite fonts. I like Bitstream Vera Sans for sans-serif fonts.
Right... until one day your favourite proprietor goes out of business or simply decides there's not enough money to be made on your piece of software. Soon after you're going to need to move your data to some other piece of software because it has this new killer feature. That day you will start wishing you opted for something just a little more interoperable.
With the increasing popularity of Firefox, Opera needed to do something to try to reverse its shrinking marketshare of the browser market. It is good to see Opera getting a little of the publicity it so desparately needs.
It is the other way around. Google should use standards, so it will display good in all browsers. HttpXmlRequest is not standard. XSL/XSLT and XML should be used on the server side. Browsers should only have to deal with XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript. Not only that the new Google producs are not standard compliant, they are also not accessible under 508.
Considering you only list MS and Sun products, companies that traditionally use their marketing departments to hype their products above their real qualities it seems about right someone uses similar methods to get them back to the ground.
Linux is not Windows
It obviously won't repeat itself verbatim, but MS has other ways to do the same thing. There was, for example, the case when Word on OS-X didn't properly support Hebrew. The Microsoft Rep said that it just wasn't worth their time to upgrade it. They still refused when Israel offered to pay for the programmers to do the fix and promise a minimum number of sales to boot.
"Sorry -- No dice. Move to Windows
It wasn't untill Israel awarded a grant to port Open Office to OS-X and seriously threatened to cut off Microsoft's standing PO for the entire government that Microsoft relented and suddenly started negotiating in good faith.
Microsoft is a company that you can trust as far as you can throw them -- and they're big.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.