Developers wouldn’t have to pick sides if only there were more centralized standards. But I highly doubt that will ever happen.

Ref: http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/249

I want to be pretty clear about something: I’m not suggesting that the W3C is useless or that we don’t need it. What I’m saying as clearly as I can is that it is simply not the place to go for new features. Instead, it’s the place to get existing features which are deployed ironed out and as compatible as possible. Only when technology is deployed and succeeds or fails can we really judge whether or not it’s going to work well (and therefore should be standardized). That’s all I’m suggesting.

As for the privileged vs. unprivileged web experience, bring it on. Using the market to prove that something is better is how it should work. Regardless, we already have the unprivileged web experience and we even give it a positive term: graceful degradation. It’s how we’ve evolved the browser stack in the past and it can serve us well again as we struggle to figure out the browser of the future. The web is resilient to changes in both content and clients, and we count on that flexibility to give us things like access to web content from mobile devices.

Building better experiences for better clients is how we will drive adoption. Firefox has proven as much via enhancements to chrome, and the conundrum for non-chrome content is that to get similar advances, we must use things that are pre-standardization. Standards compliance never got anyone’s heart racing, and that’s what’s required to get us where we want to be: users saying “I want that” because it’s better for them.

Regards

I have been involved in a startup over the last year, and we build for Firefox, then tweak to work in IE. This is not just ironic, its backwards, when we consider that IE is 80% of the browserspace. Yet I would have it no other way. Building the right way is always the right thing, and right in this case, is properly coded following appropriate principles.

The battle will not be won in the debate around standards. People using browsers have no idea about standards. They only know what works and what doesn’t.

I personally like the direction of OpenID, Oauth, Microformats etc. If the power of those platforms/ capabilities are sufficiently valid people will demand their browser de jour accept those capabilities. So yes, I agree this is not a browser war matter. Its actually a ‘people relevance’ matter.

The debate needs to centre on making OpenID, Oauth, Microformats etc, relevant to average people. This has yet to happen.

I generally agree with most of what you have to say. Just to clarify one thing: I am in no way suggesting we abandon the existing standards. Rather, I’m suggesting that browser makers should be encouraged to innovate, using the unobtrusive -renderingengine syntax, alongside the existing standards.