Martian Headsets. Long but fascinating and informative article by Joel on Software that explains why web standards are a total mess in the light of Microsoft’s development of IE 8. Required reading for anyone planning to lay into MS on this subject.
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About this site
In June 2000 I started blogging at peteashton.com and 10 years later in June 2010 I decided to stop. Blogging here, that is. I started a clean slate over on I Am Pete Ashton and maintain all manner of other web presences which are all listed here along with my contact details.
You probably came here via a Google search or from following a link on some old blog post somewhere. I hope what you find is useful in some way, though do check the publication date - it might be rather old now.
Thanks for your eyeballs.
Pete Ashton
Fascinating post, and one that’s rather close to my heart.
There’s a small product that’s my responsibility now, and it comes with maybe 30 years of baggage. I’d love to be an idealist, sweep it all away, but in the early days I got so badly burned from trying to change the smallest bits of wrong (to me) behaviour. It was truly amazing how many people were reliant on these bits of deviant behaviour. I certainly now act completely as a pragmatist.
Why this really interests me is that the baggage-leaden product is slowly, slowly being phased out in favour of something being developed by a team of idealists. They’ve redesigned the way the thing works from the ground up some four or five times now, each time necessitating that the customer (or usually the agent) has to rewrite the configuration. Their user base is still very small, so it’s not such a big deal to do this, and they’ll end up with a thing of grace and beauty, unlike the misshapen lump that I work on. But I think that they’re only free to be idealists while their user base is small.
Joel Spolsky is frequently entertaining in a rather pompous way, but informative? Not this time. I don’t buy his portrayal of the history, let alone of the future.
Chris B, your post implies that there is a way to design something from the ground-up that isn’t the awful mess that is the current web. I agree, but understanding why we are here is critical. Joel’s article, as Jez points out, is less than informative. Here’s my perspective on the issue, with a little less pomp:
http://www.robbyslaughter.com/blog/?2008-03-21