Re: info center search. III.

[BOBC@xxxxxxxxxx]

Guys,

Leif says

"James is, of course, correct. But it does us no good if IBM
doesn't care about being standards-compliant. If the advice
is "use Windoze", what does it matter whose is valid."

Guys you are forgetting one very important factor here when it comes to
browsers.  Microsoft owns the marketplace with over 90% of the hits coming
from V5 browsers and a very steady increase in V6 browsers due to the
steady increase in Windows/XP based pc's which bundle MS/IE 6.x.  There is
a much more rapid increase in the Home market than corporate computing
market, but many companies are moving to XP clients also and this will
accelerate.

The number of installed Netscape browsers is steadily decreasing. Worldwide
statistics show less than 18% of total browsers are Netscape.  Netscape 6.0
has less than 5% marketshare.

Netscape has just enough remaining marketshare to be a pain and require
that you code to support it.  Opera, and other browsers are not even a blip
on my stats all others combined are less than 1/2 percent.

So this argument about standards compliance is a nice fairy tale that will
never materialize.  You actually think Microsoft will become fully
standards compliant?  They are where they choose to be and where they can
influence the standards!  P3P is one case where Microsoft is fully
compliant.  Web Services is yet another.  Actually in many areas they are
fully compliant.

The Mozilla open source crowd made the "brilliant" (actually totally
suicidal) decision to be 100% standards compliant at the cost of not being
backwards compatible with previous browsers.

I post a notice on my websites warning users of Netscape 6.x that they are
not compatible with my site and should replace their Netscape browser with
Netscape 4.7x or Microsoft MS/IE.  We have been able to get away with this
and get good compliance from our business partners.

I think this is an example of the worst part of OpenSource development!



Bob Cancilla
Republic Indemnity Company of America
(818)382-1023