Alternatives to the W3C

[Tim Bray]

At 01:38 PM 1/19/00 -0800, Dave Winer wrote:
>1. Web developers, who must look at the content exactly as their users look
>at it. For these people, today, that's MSIE 5.x on Windows, not any content
>handler, that specific one.

Dave, please tell us you didn't really mean this.  I'm not talking about
the IE5 issue; if you want to exclude a third of the market (at least; there 
are still a lot of Macs and Unix boxes out there) from seeing your stuff, 
that's a business decision that you're free to take on its own merits.

What's silly is the notion that any Web Developer should operate on the
basis that WYSIWYG is still alive in a world full of different screen formats,
resolutions, font repertoires, and color capabilities.

I used to be a regular speaker at the Seybold conferences.  The Seybold
crowd (heavy design geeks) initially kind of hoped the Web would go away,
because they couldn't have the fine control over pixels and so on that
they were used to.  I remember like yesterday going to one in '96 (maybe 
'95) when there was a keynote-with-demo of the first release of Adobe's
PageMill... the demo featured drag&droping pictures into place on web
pages, and having them come up just right in the browser.  WYSIWYG for
the Web!  The crowd exploded in a roaring ovation.  I thought "These
people Just Don't Get It".

4 years later, that crowd generally does get it.  And is living with
the fact that you can have design excellence without WYSIWYG.  And
PageMill is still a piece of crap. -Tim

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