A removed post from Dave Hyatt

I found a post that cannot be found in Dave Hyatt's Weblog in my bloglines.com cache. The post is rather negative. Perfers that's why he removed the post. I quote it here as I think the public is deserved to know this.

If anyone, especially Dave Hyatt, think that this post is improper, tell me and I will remove it.

Feedback on Proposal

Well, we are indeed a Web divided. I received feedback (most of it private, some of it public) that was rather astonishing in its variety. The various viewpoints:

(1) A browser is never allowed to innovate. No extensions, even proprietary ones that are properly namespaced, should be allowed on the Web at all.

(2) A browser is allowed to innovate, but extensions must always be properly namespaced using XML namespaces in real XML.

(3) Innovation is allowed, and a DOCTYPE can be used to allow the extensions in both XML and HTML.

(4) Innovation is allowed, and a pseudo-namespace hack is fine.

(5) Innovation is allowed, and these protesters are wasting your time with all this pedantic nonsense.

The two dominant opinions were (1) and (5), which should provide an indicator of how polarized people are on this subject.

It is quite clear to me that no matter what we (the Safari team) do, someone is going to be unhappy. This is a no-win situation. It's particularly frustrating to me to have tried to listen to the will of the community by even coding one of the suggested solutions. It's obvious to me now that on this particular point the Web community is aimless and doesn't have a single unified opinion.

Posted on: Sat, 10 Jul 2004 03:24 PM