::scr horns of a dilemma

[Simon Wistow]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2002 at 12:09:14PM +0000, Andy Wardley said:
> I imagine that vendor-specific extensions are very important to the vendors
> because that's about all that differentiates their product from the next
> one.  One washes whiter, the other has new and improved fresh scent of spring.
> It's the only justification they have for pushing more and more products on
> us that are basically no different to the old models.

Good point. Well made. 

J2me is supposed to provide two things, First it's supposed to provide a
method for people to down load new apps to their phones - whether
they're games or whatnot - which are provided by third party vendors.

On the flip side it's supposed to provide a stable API for developers
to, err, develop for. The point being that they can produce one version
which will work for all phones, thus tripling or quadrupling their
market. (what market there is, since there are no Java enabled phones
out at the moment).

By enabling this, manufacturers get a load of extra functionality
without having to pay for it to be developed. Bonus!

However, as you point out they need something to differentiate them from
other manufacturers. And there in lies the bind.

However I'd suggest that creating multiple standards impairs the first 2
points and therefore negates the advantage of of having J2me at all
/unless/ you can create a monopoly on your extensions. Which is a bit of
a gamble. Why not just petition Sun to make the MIDP profile of Java
more functional.

If I wanted to code different versions of every different game then I'd
code to the metal (see how I make my job sound more Exciting! and Macho!
by bandying around terms that sound like Tom Crusie would say them in
Days of Thunder). Except then I'd have no way of getting my apps to the
punters but ....


> Or in other words, would browsers have evolved so quickly if it hadn't been
> for a big pissing match between Netscape and Microsoft?   

Tricky that. But I'd say yes. 

Netscape and Microsoft didn't really add any useful tags (Marquee and
Blink are *not* useful) although they did add stuff like background
images in tables and stuff. However it just meant that the W3C were
scrambling to keep up. Then, when the W3C did produce sane evolutions of
the standard (such as CSS and the DOM) they only partially implemented
them. Or implemented them badly which meant that the W3C had to ratify
extra stuff in and add cruft into the standard which slowed down the
official releases.

Even if it *did* speed up development of browsers, was that necessarily
a good thing? We now have an overly crufty, design driven HTML spec
which is trickier than it needs to be to code for and millions of people
have wasted billions of man (and woman) hours battling round bugs and
the compromises. And what do we get for it at the end of it? Badly
written web pages which are unreadable in half the browsers, take an age
to load and look shit when you finally get to see them. That includes
some of the professionally designed ones.


...


Not that I care or anything <grin>




-- 
: i'm satisfied ... yet still strangely outraged.