Re:Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness
by Someone on Saturday September 18, 2010 @06:00PM
(#1705045)
I see three different 'issues':
- should we allow companies to bend the standard in order to innovate?
- is this implementation a good way to implement this innovation?
- is this an innovation that we would like to see on other OSes?
I think the answers to these questions should be yes, no, and maybe. The 'yes' is because that is the norm, and it hasn't turned out bad. The 'no' is for two reasons:
- as others indicated, putting this stuff in an external file makes more sense.
- terminology could be made a bit more platform independent.
The 'maybe' is because I think this innovation will turn out to be useful. Other OSes or browsers could implement the way to activate in a completely different way. On the other hand, I do not quite see how this is different from a bookmark that the browser UI knows to display in a small pop-up window. A single meta-tag that indicates 'show this URL in a small borderless window close to what you think is the point it was opened from', plus some Javascript call 'ask the user to put the following URL in his start menu' could do most, if not all what this tries to accomplish. Splitting this into parts has the advantage that it promotes reuse.
- should we allow companies to bend the standard in order to innovate? - is this implementation a good way to implement this innovation? - is this an innovation that we would like to see on other OSes?
I think the answers to these questions should be yes, no, and maybe. The 'yes' is because that is the norm, and it hasn't turned out bad. The 'no' is for two reasons:
- as others indicated, putting this stuff in an external file makes more sense. - terminology could be made a bit more platform independent.
The 'maybe' is because I think this innovation will turn out to be useful. Other OSes or browsers could implement the way to activate in a completely different way. On the other hand, I do not quite see how this is different from a bookmark that the browser UI knows to display in a small pop-up window. A single meta-tag that indicates 'show this URL in a small borderless window close to what you think is the point it was opened from', plus some Javascript call 'ask the user to put the following URL in his start menu' could do most, if not all what this tries to accomplish. Splitting this into parts has the advantage that it promotes reuse.