Microsoft's Goals For Their New Web Rendering Engine 166
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has put up a post about explaining what they wanted to accomplish when they started working on Project Spartan, the new web browser that will ship with Windows 10. They say some things you wouldn't expect to hear from Microsoft: "We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for. We needed a plan which ensured that our customers have a good experience regardless of whether they browse the head or tail of the Web. We needed a plan which gave enterprise customers a highly backward compatible browser regardless of how quickly we pushed forward with modern HTML5 features." They also explain how they decided against using WebKit so they wouldn't contribute to "a monoculture on the Web."
I got a goal for you (Score:2, Insightful)
I got a goal for you: Make it not an insecure steaming piece of shit!
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But it's current IE (Score:2)
Heads or tails (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like a good plan... a lot of people use sites like Tinder and Grindr to find both head and tail.
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LOL, but seriously... what does "the head or tail of the web" mean?
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Monoculture for the web (Score:3)
You mean like Internet Explorer used to be?
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My first thought was why not webkit, it was answered at the end of the summery " They also explain how they decided against using WebKit so they wouldn't contribute to "a monoculture on the Web." and makes sense (didn't RTA), being a backup browser for sites you can't access.
I not even don't use IE but it's never been updated and it's access blocked. I'll wait and see what they've come up with.
Never did install Win10 but able, didn't care for them being able to access my system, mic, or webcam when they wan
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didn't care for them being able to access my system, mic, or webcam when they wanted.
So you installed Chrome, which... can access your system, mic, or webcam when it wants to...
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Exactly. Lets not go back to that. Last thing we want is a webkit monoculture.
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Also, I am a Web Dev.
Hard to believe (Score:5, Interesting)
> "We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for."
Can you even IMAGINE Microsoft saying that 15 years ago? 10 years ago? So is it because they are a better company now before... or is it just because they have no choice but to cooperate (since people left IE in droves for Firefox, Opera, and Chrome)?
>" They also explain how they decided against using WebKit so they wouldn't contribute to "a monoculture on the Web."
Oh right.... because Microsoft would never want to support a monoculture... Hmm... I need to go find some Twilight Zone episodes to watch, now.
Re: Hard to believe (Score:5, Interesting)
IE 11 implements W3C standards better than any browser. Webkit might have more check offs from html5test but they are not implemented the same way as w3c.
Css 3 animations are a good example. Chrome does not do them right without hacks.
It is not IE 6 anymore and Sun and IBM subverted and changed proposed standards IE 6 used in development on purpose. It was not designed to break Web pages. Mozilla and Netscape were worse in 2001 believe it or not
Re: Hard to believe (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who says the OS should provide nothing useful and let app makers make their money on it?
If you set up a straw man, then it's very easy to kill it. The issue is not an OS providing something, it's that Microsoft, which had a near-monopoly in the desktop space, used the money from selling the OS to fund development in another market (browsers) and then bundled their version, undercutting the competition with cross subsidies. There was a thriving browser market before IE was introduced, but it's hard to compete when most of your customers are forced to pay to fund the development of your compet
Re: Hard to believe (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as Microsoft has done, you too can separate IE and Windows.
I'll believe that Microsoft has separated IE and Windows when I can have more than one version/instance of IE installed and running at the same time like I can with external products such as Firefox.
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http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE [tredosoft.com]
Which allows you to have IE 6,7,8,9 and 10, all installed at the same time. And running separately. I used to use it when I needed to test websites I was developing on multiple IE versions. Now, I just test in Chrome and everyone else can suck it.
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Well, no, I meant without resorting to trickery.
But if you can do it at all, that helps for development at least, so thanks for the info.
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That's not a very good test. You can run more than one copy of Firefox, but only if you hack around making sure that they don't use the same profile directory etc. In other words, the default install doesn't support multiple concurrent versions running at the same time.
Same with Chrome. Same with Safari. None of them support portable mode with separate profiles and the ability to run multiple copies at once. In fact Firefox used to fail to run if it noticed "firefox.exe" was already running, so you couldn't
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Microsoft's CSS box model, for example, was different, and many websites today use the standards to set their sites back to the old Microsoft box model because it makes much more logical sense and makes doing responsive websites easier. Funny that.
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Don't go posting facts and reason in a MS 2 minutes hate session. Next thing you know they'll accuse you of being a Redmondite.
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Actually, they don't support standards better than other browsers. They just support a couple of features better than others do. A quick look at testing suites and caniuse.com reveals just how far behind they are compared to others. I'm glad they've improved, but misinformation isn't going to help make them look any better.
Re: Hard to believe (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm getting the impression that is why they are shipping the Spartan web browser. I've been getting the feeling that they've been having troubles coding IE to support many HTML5 features without breaking a their legacy crap. Add to that the browser is heavily integrated into the win32s code and you're in for a coding nightmare. They were never going to be able to develop for changes as fast as competing browsers with that model and they knew it. As such, this move makes the most sense given their options. As long as they stay dedicated to working with web standards, I'm all for it. I'm just going to be very wary given their history with the web.
Re: Hard to believe (Score:2)
Firefox was Mozillas spartan. Netscape code really bogged it down. Firefox was just better after the striping
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No, it isn't, and it never has been. You utterly fail to understand the 'integration' issue with IE.
yes, it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
you fail to understand the single point of failure issues with ms components in general, not just ie. ie is just an example of having such vulnerable crap open to external access.
granted, i don't know if this still exists in windows 8. i very much guess so, but i don't really care. if you use windows, you should.
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IE itself can EASILY be removed from a system. Delete the EXE, done. Its been that way ALWAYS. Even during the court battles.
While this is technically true, it's also misleading. You could delete iexplore.exe, but don't expect a working system afterwards. Lots of other parts of Windows (and Office) invoked iexplore.exe directly, rather than providing a web view with MSHTML.dll or invoking the default browser via the URL opening APIs.
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That depends on your point of view I suppose. So you think that a HTML parser, renderers, FTP parsers are part of IE. At what layer is it no longer IE, and part of the OS? Why stop at the layer and dig down another layer and say you can't delete IE because the OS still can create TCP sockets? Or down another layer and it can do IP? Or down another layer and it knows how to handle ethernet packets? IE was and is only the top layer... The application. If you want to refer to the entire HTML parser and
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You've over-thought it to the point you are 100% wrong, and your only point is that you don't know what a browser is.
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I know exactly what a browser is, but apparently you do not. A html rendering engine is not a browser. A browser may use a system supplied rendering engine, or it may use it's own rendering engine in order to browse. Much like it may also use the networking components of the OS, or it may bypass some (or nearly all of) the OS components and do it's own networking stuff. Saying that you can't delete IE because you can't delete one of the components that it uses is just plain silly. What if IE decided to
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Or perhaps you think that MSHTML contains more than it does when you say the user interface survives. The standard File/Edit/View/Window menu is not in there. None of the bookmark stuff is in there. The UI to add/clear cookies is not in there. The menu, dialogs, toolbar, window tabs, print preview, print dialogs, URL bar, favorites, back/home/forward buttons, status bar, and pretty sure the debugger are not in MSHTML. Pretty much anything you could consider any part of the user interface (aside from re
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You are wrong. A program that renders is a browser. For Windows, that's the OS.
The proof you are wrong? You mentioned bookmarks, but what about cache? If the OS puts things in IE cache with IE deleted, wouldn't that indicate that the application function of caching is still active? Or is bookmarks a application function, but cache isn't. If bookmarks are required to different
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. The standard File/Edit/View/Window menu is not in there.
Are you lying, or just an idiot? Have you ever tried it? You still have the File/Edit/View menus when you delete ie.exe in older versions of windows. I haven't tried on the newest, but older ones would actually load IE in File Explorer (all the menus across the top, the E logo, and all, no idea about bookmarks, didn't think that would be such an issue years later for some jackass on the Internet), when IE.EXE was deleted and you browsed in File Explorer to a web site.
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A program that renders is a browser.
Only according to you.
application function of caching
Why would you assume caching is an application function? Caching is not necessarily an application function at all. All layers of a program stack does caching.
Then Lynx is a rendering engine, but not a browser, because the last time I used it, it didn't have bookmarks.
Your logic is flawed. I never said browsers need bookmarks to be a browser, but bookmarks if available would typically be an application level construct and therefor be controlled by the application. You implication that I said all browsers must have bookmarks is just plain wrong.
Oh, and my Android phone will save bookmarks, even if you delete all the browsers off it.
That's nice. And this has what to do with any
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Are you lying, or just an idiot? Have you ever tried it? You still have the File/Edit/View menus when you delete ie.exe in older versions of windows. I haven't tried on the newest, but older ones would actually load IE in File Explorer (all the menus across the top, the E logo, and all, no idea about bookmarks, didn't think that would be such an issue years later for some jackass on the Internet), when IE.EXE was deleted and you browsed in File Explorer to a web site.
Are you lying or just an idiot? Have you ever tried it? If you delete/rename iexplore.exe (not IE.EXE -- there is no such file), and you type a url into file explorer, it tries to open IE in a new window and since it doesn't exist, it does nothing but you see a quick flicker. Perhaps you should try things before calling people an idiot and looking like one yourself.
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It might have used to be true, but I can assure you that anyone caught doing that would be in for a major smackdown at least in the past 5 years.
This was especially a thing due to the officially supported Windows 7 N.
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Yea, they could but, what company wants to spend 2-5 times the staff, time and money just to get the same result as your competitors. By doing it this way, their costs should be on par for development of Chrome and Safari. Mozilla is a strange duck in this arena as far as development so comparing them isn't quite right.
I agree; as long as they continue to play nice with the rest of the vendors, I'm all for them being in the race.
Re: Hard to believe (Score:2)
Does it test implementation? Game pad support as one example was just now a proposal. IE doesn't support that therefore it is not compliant is not true as no standard implementation is agreed upon
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I don't know that's true. Gecko is open source as well. I'd say Webkit is likely dominant because Google picked it as an alternative to Firefox and Google's programmers plus Apple's programmers worked cooperatively for years. That pairing could have happened on a closed source project under a licensing agreement as per many other projects jointly developed.
The other thing I think that helped Webkit is that Webkit was designed from the ground up to be useful for other applications to build small custom b
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Microsoft used to say these sorts of things all the time. They even fooled a lot of people at first.
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They're barely even trying to hide it this time, though. I mean come on, "Spartan". Yeah right. Without the PR, their true colors show through!
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Can you even IMAGINE Microsoft saying that 15 years ago? 10 years ago?
Yes, think of the standard pattern:
1) Embrace.
2) Extend.
3) Extinguish.
This fits perfectly in the pattern, it is an echo of "Developers, developers, developers!", it is exactly what you would expect from Microsoft when they realize they are back to the Embrace step.
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All of us who know Microsoft's history in this area need to watch them carefully and make sure that none of the people we advise are caught unaware. That being said, as long as they don't pull their old behavior, I'm all for their current track.
Re:Hard to believe (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft is a very different company than they were under Gates or the Sweat-hog. They long ago figured out that their cash cows were kind of fragile, and they more recently figured out that they alienated a lot of developers. They are now trying to find ways to woo developers to any of their product families, not just to Windows. And they've done some great work on a lot of software engineering fronts, including secure development, powerful tools, integrations, and are even dabbling in open source,
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Can a leopard change its spots?
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When it's the next generation of them, yes. That doesn't mean they will, though. We'll have to wait and see and be wary.
Leopard can become Snow Leopard (Score:2)
I'm sure there is still some culture of embrace, extend, extinguish within Microsoft. I'm sure some in the business products group still feel like they have no competition and they can treat customers as poorly as they wish. However, the worst elements of Microsoft's culture were rooted in their monopoly, the fact that they could do whatever they wanted and customers would still buy from them. Today, the MAJORITY of hardware purchased runs Android, not Windows. I think Microsoft has taken that fact to
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I say if rendering their cash cows 'kind of fragile' causes them to become a different company, render away. No sense stopping now, when they're just beginning to change. Believe me, if they had a way of locking developers down to Metro, they'd do it.
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That's the change: they've come to the realization that they can't lock developers down to anything, at least not like they used to. I think it's long past due, but that's from an outsider's perspective where it's easier to see the whole landscape, not just focus what goes on in Redmond.
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It isn't that they realize they cannot do that, it is that they are still looking for a way to get back to doing that.
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And [Microsoft has] done some great work on a lot of software engineering fronts, including secure development, powerful tools, integrations, and are even dabbling in open source,[sic]
Only until they can find a way to subvert it. Don't let Microsoft's current worries confuse you into thinking that that company has changed in any way, shape, or form. The moment Microsoft management think the coast is clear, they will drive their hidden knives into your back. It's one of the few things Microsoft does well.
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Microsoft did a lot of great engineering under Gates and Ballmer as well. In terms of softening their competitive streak that happens to many companies as they move up market. IBM for example is far less proprietary now than they used to be.
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LLVM support is actually coming already in VS 2015 (it's there in the current CTPs). It's snuck away under "C++ mobile development" category, but effectively it's using Clang to compile binaries, and lldb over ssh to remotely debug them on an actual Android device.
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If they ported Visual Studio to Linux and OS/X
I actually suspect that that could happen sometime in the future.
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As a developer who recently had to contact google, I can confirm they are worse. Dropped complete support for an underlying technology we used from them with 6 weeks "notice". From "we recommend using this".. "to this won't work at all in 6 weeks". In fact, they haven't had time to remove their recommendations from their own dev areas yet. Thanks google.
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> "We needed a plan to make it easy for Web developers to build compatible sites regardless of which browser they develop first for."
Can you even IMAGINE Microsoft saying that 15 years ago?
yes. it's old. ms has been lying and spreading bs and fud since day one. an egregious and sick example of their cynicism in this area is "compatibility mode".
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Developers! Developers! Developers!
They always tried to make platforms that were easy to program for, it is just that the platform changed. Yes, they were dragged to this new platform kicking and screaming, but it was inevitable.
Also a monoculture based on an open source project is very different than what we had before.
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Yes I can. That's the sort of stuff they did say 20 years ago. They were advocates of both standards and individual experimentation. So for example they liked Flash being cross platform but wanted Active-X for when developers wanted platform specific features.
10 years ago their goal was to retard progress on the web.
I completely trust Microsoft. (Score:1, Funny)
And you should too.
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Are you going for a funny mod? I'm all for their current track but, that doesn't mean for a second that I trust them, just that I'll give them a chance.
I'm glad Microsoft doesn't want to ... (Score:2)
... contribute to a monoculture by avoiding WebKit. Just so long as this isn't just going to be another form of developer lock-in. (Which I suspect it will be.)
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Until it runs on something other than Windows it's already locked-in.
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I'm not suggesting that running IE in a VM means it's not locked-in but it's pretty handy, even for Windows based web devs I'd imagine.
* Free as in beer, not free as in liberty, obviously.
things you wouldn't expect to hear from Microsoft (Score:1)
Really? Why not? Microsoft has been moving in this direction for quite some time now, not matter what the haters on /. like to insist.
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What substantive actions can you point to that don't run purely on their platform? (Promises and PR statements don't count.)
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That's all very nice, but MS is a software company. I'll admit I was thinking of cross-platform development environments, like their announced open source .NET, about which I know little, and I don't really count stuff they sell as end products. I will acknowledge that this is bias on my part.
OTOH, ... you actually use those things on a tablet? As other than file viewers? (You didn't say you did, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.)
That said, if I'd been thinking of consumer end-products I'd never have
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30 years ago (1998)
Are these dog years?
Embrace (Score:1)
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Look at what Google is doing with Chrome. They are beginning to leverage their other services to steer people to Chrome by only developing to Chrome instead of open standards. It's a feedback loop to steer people to their browser, then offer services through the browser that are Google specific. It's all for your data people. They realized long ago that data is a moneymaker and the best way to get it is directly to the source.
It's all that's left for Google to do, go forth. I would imagine they are able to do now what NSA could only dream of years ago. That sign in at a Google search screen bothers me, at which point is one going to be required to use it.
Bootstrapping a Google account (Score:2)
That sign in at a Google search screen bothers me, at which point is one going to be required to use it.
Last time I checked (which was today [google.com]), creating a Gmail account required a mobile phone number. So for someone buying a mobile phone in order to have a mobile phone number in order to create a Google account, where is one supposed to search for reviews of mobile phones? If a different web search engine, then why not just stick with that instead of using Google Search?
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I'm not sure I'd accuse Apple of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". That's not really their model at all. For one thing they are disinterested in monopoly.
Same old song (Score:1)
They always say this now, and their browser is always shit. Its more than safe to expect it to suck.
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They always say this now, and their browser is always shit. Its more than safe to expect it to suck.
To be fair, it's gotten better and better. It's to the point now where I don't dread having to use it to download firefox.
There is no 3 or 4th place 'winners' (Score:2)
All those plans in two words (Score:4, Insightful)
Standards compliance.
Seriously, all the solutions to those plans have been staring them in the face for 20 years. Ironically, MS's own desire for a monoculture on the web prevented them from seeing that.
"the head or tail of the Web" (Score:2)
IE7 was supposed to be standards-compliant... (Score:3)
...wasn't it? I've sort of lost track, but I think Microsoft has made precisely this claim for every browser. Yes, here we go: [zdnet.com]
" That's your vision for IE7, to definitely support Web standards?
Chris: Absolutely, in IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards. Even at the expense of more backwards compatibility..."
Then much the same thing was said of IE8,
and then we read that
"I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised to read this post on el reg that highlights that IE9 is currently the most standards compliant beta browser on the block. Iâ(TM)m really proud of the work the IE9 team is doing to nail the the things that were previously levelled at Internet Explorer for being a 'bad browser.'"
It's the same every time. They acknowledge that the previous browser wasn't standards-compliant after all, and promise the one they are now working on is.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
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And each new version the adherence to the standards grew considerably. The real problem was that IE6 was the top dog for so freaking long that every single site on the web was made to support it. IE7 and 8 are still a clusterfuck to develop for, but IE9 is ok. It is missing a lots of modern features but the ones it does have it adheres to the standard quite well (its debugger still sucks though, so it is still annoying to develop for it). I develop targeting IE>=9, Chrome, Firefox and Safari and I don't
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It's the same every time. They acknowledge that the previous browser wasn't standards-compliant after all, and promise the one they are now working on is.
And it payed off no? as a professional web developer I very pleased with how much better IE10 is over IE6 in terms of standards compliance.
If anything, they have been accelerating the rate of adoption of standards.
I'll believe it when I see it. (Score:2)
We have seen some suprises leaning towards the positive side from MS lately, no doubt. I'll admit that. However, MS has screwed up so much, so often, for so long that I'm weary of taking their word for it when it comes to enabling a more hassle free web.
If MS offers a relyably usable web frontend I at least will stop recommending *against* MS with my customers. In my opinion it would be smart for them to focus on openess and professional services with native software as a fallback for the heavy lifting. The
For once, backwards compatibility is a BAD idea (Score:3)
The Web is in the mess it now is because Microsoft (and, to a lesser extent, Netscape, back in the day) has gone through so many iterations of deliberately trying to create subtly incompatible variants of HTML. Creating a browser which is backwards compatible with that mess simply perpetuates the mess. The new browser should simply refuse to render non-conforming legacy pages at all - that would force web site owners to clean up their act in short order.
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Re:More of this (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, at the time MS adopted the CRLF line ending style there were *four* standards, none of them dominant:
CR, LF, CRLF, and LFCR (called NLCR..new line carriage return). They picked one existing standard, and Unix was already using another. The supporters of the other standards have died off, so there are only two standards left.
So don't blame MS for all the bad decisions. Only some of them. I still wouldn't want to use their software, though. Perhaps if they live up to their current "We love FOSS" line for a decade or so I'll change my mind, but currently it just feels like their latest lie.
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Re:More of this (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is because in the olden days having CRLF meant being able to dump a raw text file to a printing device. Unix had a tty driver that could handle adding the missing CR. CP/M and DOS didn't have any such thing. That doesn't mean I haven't spent 20+ years being annoyed by CRLF though.
That's not it, CRLF was a feature. How do you make strike-through text on a type-wheel printer? It automatically advances to the next position and it only has a fixed number of characters, you don't double it with strikethrough-a in addition to regular a. So you send a CR - carriage return - to return to first position, space your way over to the text to be striked out and make a ------- over it before you CRLF to the next line. And you have no idea how old knowing that makes me feel.
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CR was also useful for double-printing. When you ribbon was worn out you could just rewind it and re-use it, but have the printer overwrite every line so each character was printed twice, giving you about 80% as much ink as a new ribbon would provide.
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Still, I think the main thing we should all be happy about is that MS didn't decide to create a new ASCII escape code called X-CRLF or something!
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Well said, excellent comment. Just a correction. CR LF (Windows), LF (Unix) and CR (Macintosh) so there are still 3. Also 0x00 is still used for lots of mainframe data for end of line though that gets a bit more tricky since the underlying concept of file doesn't map as well.
As CRLF was most common on teletypes.
No LF in Notepad (Score:2)
So why over the past decade and a half hasn't Microsoft added additional support in Windows Notepad for LF, on which every other major platform has since standardized?
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If I see a One-drive button you're dead! (disclaimer : not a real death threat)
I LOL'd but sad this new Internet you have to be sure how it's to be taken.
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Not hate, just total distrust in a company that pulled the same scam many times.
To be fair, other companies do the same thing. Red Hat is doing the same thing with systemd.
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Re: Project "Spartan"? (Score:3, Informative)
In history, the Spartans were the despotic enemies of democracy who constantly tried to defeat Athens. They could have stopped the Persians at the sea crossing, but delayed because they had a religious festival and finally sent a tiny troop to Thermopylae (too little too late). Those troops did acquit themselves well, but Greece would have been overrun if the Athenians hadn't brought up their army and crushed the Persians.
So yeah, an appropriate name for Microsoft (and for people who know movies but not h
Wrong game, but right analogy. (Score:2)