Bonum Certa Men Certa

“On the SVG List, a Couple of People [Are] Leery of Microsoft.”

"The Internet? We are not interested in it."

--Bill Gates, 1993



Summary: Microsoft's entrance into a panel that it has battled against for about a decade leads to great skepticism and worry among those who paid attention to Microsoft's behaviour

MICROSOFT boosters and several others [1, 2, 3, 4] seem to have taken notice of the news about SVG, but not much is being said about Microsoft's long- and short-term history of corrupting standards bodies such as ISO almost as a matter of strategy/policy. Microsoft managers have expressed their reluctance to help form standards and The Source writes about this very important fact:



The primary point of interest to me in this is the idea of Microsoft joining a Working Group for a technology that it has been pointedly ignoring for 11 years, and for which Microsoft can boast an industry leading 0.00% support for in its latest and greatest browser.

What exactly is Microsoft going to contribute here? What deep pool of SVG experience and credibility gets Microsoft a seat at the table?

[...]

In any case, now the W3C will probably be burning calories proving Microsoft hasn’t corrupted the W3C ISO-OOXML style.


”On the SVG list," told us a reader who follows it, "a couple of people [are] leery [sic] of MS.“ The creator of the World Wide Web, who is an opponent of software patents by the way, slammed Microsoft for its attitude towards SVG. That was about a year ago.

Tim Berners-Lee
Image from Wikimedia



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