Amanda complained that Netscape pisses all over the standardization committees.
Well guys, the victor has room to move. It must come as a big shock to Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, but reality is that Netscape can set WWW standards and they cannot.
I disagree. The WWW is no longer a research project, and if it is to survive it will have to do so by consensus, either formal or informal. That's what standards committees, and groups like the IETF, exist to facilitate. The alternative is fragmentation, which we're already starting to see (in part because of Netscape's unilateral changes to HTML). Let me re-iterate something here: I'm biased. I'm a commercial vendor. I'm perfectly happy to live by the sword and die by the sword if that's how the market ends up--I just think it would be better for the Internet as a whole if the actual on-the-wire protocols and formats become standards, so that people don't have to worry about what clients or servers they are talking to. UI, performance, service, and such are fair game. Infastructure has to be consensus-based or it fails. But hey, if Netscape can innovate by fiat, so can anyone else. Right now, I'm betting that Netscape will decide it's worth cooperating with the standards process. If they don't, they'll just fragment their own market. I can live with that, but I think it would be a shame. Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation