Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Rant

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:1/6/2000; 7:12:32 AM
Topic:HTML Renderer in the MacOS
Msg #:14118 (In response to 14116)
Prev/Next:14117 / 14120

Thanks for the sanity Luke!

My prescription is that we deal with reality as it is, not as some people would like it to be.

I'm talking to Mac people as a web developer faced with tough choices because I want to support the Mac fully, but Apple isn't cooperating.

I did finally listen to Jobs' speech. They're clearly on the way to creating their own web. In the normal web context, this would be seen as a Bad Thing. If it were Bill Gates on stage people would be screaming bloody murder at the idea of locking people into an OS thru web services. I see it as a Sad Thing for the web. We've got the Microsoft Web, and now the Apple Web. Poor Linux!!

At least if we had the IE control baked into the Mac OS, we could use it as a placeholder until Linux caught up in CSS thru Mozilla or Netscape.

People who point to some random HTML library from Apple don't understand where we're at on the web. With MSIE/Win gaining such dominant market share, we *have* to go that way to be competitive. In that way I'm thankful to Blogger for leading the way here. We couldn't have done it, we have too many Mac users. But now it should be clear, we have to do things that only work in MSIE/Win to stay competitive in our market, which is group web writing environments.

I'm surprised the Open Source leaders aren't complaining about Apple's web lock-in strategy. I knew this faceoff would come when I saw Eric S. Raymond on stage with Steve Jobs. Either he sold out or he'll disclaim his support for Apple.

Thanks for listening.

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