De Facto vs. De Jure Standards

It's not the experimentation that's the problem -- it's the permanance.
Experimentation is good, even necessary; it's how we learn our way
around this new technology.

But when you declare that your browser is going to support extra
functionality permanently, it *does* cause some real market skew. It
means that a substantial number of people will write to those
extensions (since they know that they will always be around), even
knowing that only a portion of the Net will be able to read it. The
users, then, will have to pick up your browser if they want to see
those sites, and lany will. This leaves the other browser vendors in
something of a bind -- either they implement those extensions (in
which case you effectively *are* setting the standards) or they don't,
and they lose market share.

This isn't theory -- it's exactly what's happened with And while you aren't exactly Netscape yet, Webspace *is* getting all
the publicity; you've got a relatively big marketing machine behind
you. I see it as quite likely that the same thing will happen to you
in the long run. That publicity is an initial edb>, and the extra
c.

This doesn't imply malice, but it *is* a fact -- one thing that's
becoming clear in the browser market is that a market leader is a
300-pound gorilla, whether it likes it or not, unli> it
*scrupula> ly* avoids becoming one. I'm seeing a distressing
number of pages out there that aren't legal VRML, but which run
fine on WebSpace.

And that is bad for the standards process, because it encours the
standard to grow without rhyme or reason, with now that isn't critical, but I'm seeing a likely divergence when, for
instance, we hit behaviours -- it isn't clear that the likely
behaviour model for VRML is going to be much like that for
Inventor. I'm not at all sure what's going to happen then; things
might work out well, but I wish I could be more confident.

In short, I'm genuinely worried that we're going to wind up going
down the same path as HTML, with a de facto standard from the formal one. I can't see that as being terribly good for the
future -- we're a long ways from finishing this project yet, and I
suspect that we're going to have a lot more trouble with extensions than HTML does; lots more things have to hang together
properly if we're going to turn this into a real cyberspace standard...

-- Justin
Also personal opinions...

Random Quote du Jour:

"Use your imagination. A long time ago someone lectured me about wretched
excess. My conclusion was that it sounded like loads of fun."
-- Carol>