Hi Eliotte,


> If a group were to deliver a browser that radically lowered the cost
> of development and enabled new applications with better user
> interfaces, it would be adopted widely, despite being incompatible
> with the existing installed base. No, you wouldn't be able to use
> these technologies on the public Internet, but it would nonetheless
> be a huge advantage for any company or organization that provided
> such a solution. Sadly, the only browser company that seems willing
> to provide new functionality that goes beyond the past is Microsoft.
> Opera and Mozilla seem have confused their inability to pass
> Microsoft on the Information Superhighway with an inability to follow
> a different road to a different destination. :-(
> --
> 

yop! very true. In my daily practice I see a lot of intranets using IE
simply because it offers more then the others. For instance, the other
browsers still do not allow augmenting the default behavior. To be able to
separate the code from the declarative statements improve code re-use and
therefore reduces costs. Moreover, you can transform an XML document on the
client side into HTML and tag element to be "editable". Hence, only some
parts of the displayed document are editable. And on and on....

W3C seems like a parliament too far away from practical needs and caught
into political vested interests or simply jammed into ethereal dialogs.  

This said, it seems that Mozilla came back to life and is now improving,
which is no longer the case for IE. If mozilla brings a good run time
environment for intranets apps, then things may change and we may have an
alternative option to XAML/IE/longhorn. Mozilla teams should listen more to
developers needs and less to W3C in order to succeed.

Cheers
Didier PH Martin.