Alternatives to the W3C

[Steven Champeon]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2000, Dave Winer wrote:
> >>And the folks in your audience who don't have the latest browser? What
> then?
> 
> Easy. The functionality has to degrade so that it at least *works* in (some)
> older browsers.

Dave, the discussion at hand was regarding the use of XML+XSL on the
client side. Please explain how this is supposed to "degrade".
 
> These days it's pretty safe to require a version 4-level browser.

That depends on your audience. We still develop sites for one of our
largest clients that degrade well enough to be viewed in Lynx, as over 20%
of their audience - the consumers who buy the client's books - are still
using Lynx or old GUI browsers on university networks, which, as you may
not be aware, are notorious for not upgrading to the latest OS revision.

And yet, we're using XML as a storage format for much of their content,
and parsing it into HTML (though using Perl rather than XSL, given the
limitations of their environment and other factors).

> This is exactly analogous to the "system requirements" that pre-web apps
> used to have.

Yes, I suppose you're right. So, a glorious return to the closed and
proprietary world the Web was supposed to liberate us from. Whee. I
find it hard to celebrate such willingness to sacrifice everything we
had gained over the past seven years.

Steve



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