Microsoft is boiling the frogs again....
Here's the deal.
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You can exercise your right to request standards now. Or find\r\nyourself locked into "solutions" which solve more of your vendors'\r\nproblems than your own.
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Nobody ever said being principled doesn't incur some level of pain.\r\nIt's generally an offset of current vs. future benefits. The path of\r\nleast resistance tends to have negative long-term consequences.
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If you've got some compelling business app that requires a dedicated\r\nbrowser, you may make an exception. But note that you're doing so, and\r\ninform your vendor that you consider the requirement a negative\r\nstrike.
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Two parallels:
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\r\n- "Binary only" GNU/Linux kernel drivers. These were somewhat popular\r\nfor a time with HW manufacturers who didn't want to go fully open\r\nsource, but didn't want to miss the GNU/Linux bandwagon either. Their\r\ncompromise was binary drivers. The catch was that a given driver was\r\nrated for a limited set of kernel version(s). The inevitable conflict\r\nwas feature X supported in kernel n, and driver Y, only supported in\r\nkernel n + epsilon. The usual result: another hardware vendor was\r\nfound when at all possible. Binary-only drivers are frequently worse\r\nthan useless: they provide a false impression of support.
\r\n\r\n- Consider the logical outcome of accepting arbitrary browser\r\nrequirements: what's to make site A's requirements reasonable, but not\r\nsite B's? And if these requirements conflict? A well-known limitation\r\nof MSIE is that because it's "integrated" to the OS (actually: the user\r\nshell), a given system can only support one version of MSIE. With most\r\nalternatives, it's trivial to support multiple browser versions (I've\r\nhad systems with NS 3.01 - 7 installed for compatibility testing\r\npurposes). It's pretty easy to get into the situation where one site's\r\nrequirements conflict with another and a given computing platform lacks\r\nthe flexibility to accomodate the conflict. The business world is\r\ncurrently advocating standards-based web application design precisely\r\nfor this reason. You simply can't accomodate different browser\r\nrequirements from different vendors, clients, or partners.
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In short: while my own motivations for this action are principled,\r\nthe truth is that it's really the only pragmatic choice. User-agent\r\nbased discrimination is not tolerable. Best push back\r\nnow.
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