I agree with where I think you are coming from. One thing though I do not think you made very clear in your post is the difference between open innovation and proprietary innovation. IE brought great innovation with activex but also useless innovation because it can only be used by one browser. If all innovation heads in that direction I can imagine teachers saying “Now kids we are visiting 4 sites today, please open IE, Firefox, Opera, and Sarfari because each site uses a different technology.”

Web innovation is different than past software innovation because cross-compatibility has to be built in whether standard or not.

I believe Apple were advocating building standard web sites with standard practices in mind for the iPhone, as opposed to fully-customized sites with custom codebases. Their browser is for all intents and purposes (IMO), a mobile version of the desktop Safari minus a few mouse and key events due to the physical design of the phone. We’re seeing iPhone-only-type apps out there as I suspect people want an iPhone-like UI, it’s the early days of development and so on – but again I think Apple are saying instead just to consider the phone as another variant of Safari, and not to treat it so specially.

It’s supposed to be a selling point that the iPhone can view the ‘real’ internet better than all the other mobile browsers (and it does). It’s just funny that people are making apps that work great in Palm OS, or WM browsers because they’ve been designed for the iPhone.

@emerkhay: “Dougal and JP, I think people are upset because Microsoft is trying to innovate/change the game, without putting their best effort with making their product follow the standards that they want to change.” But that’s not what the articles are about, it’s like people read IE and innovation and none of the other words and just went off on a rant. Probably one of the most derailed comment threads I’ve seen in a while (not saying it’s not an interesting debate, just doesn’t really have much to do with the post).

8-)

Haha – you have it easy. Imagine how hard it is to support native software across all of those platforms (and variations within each). Not that it excuses everything – just trying to make people remember those dark days. (if they had them) You know, the kind of days where some s.o.b. “sales staff” manages to convince the higher ups that we have to support “super keen platform X” because one of the customers nephews sons friends has it.

Almost enough to bring you to tears. (not to mention the oppressive heat index going ever higher with more test hardware there to torture you )

So, before we had to develop applications for Firefox and then made sure they worked under Safari, Opera and IE – multiplied by the number of major compatibility-breaking versions they have. Some added support for mobile browsers. Now, we need to add iPhone. Tomorrow, we’ll have to make sure our web app works “natively” on Microsoft Surface. Then, iPhone 2. And we’ll be adding more and more work to our already big plate, we will work under a lot more stress, we’ll deliver a lot more slowly and a lot more costly… when is this going to end?

Not to mention adding support for Facebook today, tomorrow for MySpace and so on and so forth. Even a simple web app turns to be a behemoth, don’t you think? It has to support native login, Open ID, Card Space, then Microsoft’s new Web Authentication (Passport 2.0), Google Auth, Yahoo! BBAuth and so on and so forth.

Why don’t we simply boycott all those people trying to make our life more miserable? :-)

I would love for someone to innovate. Innovate your heart away, but please allow your platform to stand on the current standards so that today I will be able to use your product with ease.

As stated by Jens, if innovation means busting standards all the time, causing double the work for web designers, then I find it more ‘irresponsible’ rather than ‘innovative’

Having moved to an iphone from a an xv6700 (which had full touch screen and could load all the Windows Mobile Browsers) I was amazed that people would make a site with the specific screen dimensions of the iphone rather than one that would expand to fill any browser screen (something that iUI does nicely, I’ll note).

It seems very shortsighted to make full blown apps that only work in a fraction of the potential audience when with just a little bit of attention you can make the same site function perfectly well in the WM PDA’s, Blackberries and Palms.

Why target 2% of the global market when pleasing the other 70-80% of it isn’t really that huge of an issue.

It would almost be the same mentality of building a website that only works in Safari 3 and will break IE and Firefox.

Now, where things went wrong is that the W3C got hijacked by the mobile/accessibility crowd and was pulled into “the great redesign”, aka CSS3/XHTML/XFORMS, which never really went anywhere. The idea of having standards is still very sound, it’s just that the execution at the W3C up until the relaunch of the HTML working group was broken.

As for IE4.. Netscape 4 killed IE3, and IE4 blew Netscape 4 away. Every other browser was a joke and real hardcore internetters used Gopher or TelNet anyways, thinking that internet should be used as intended (pure text and files) instead of all that fancy nancy graphics.

Oh my, I’m getting nostalgic.