Headphones on Mars, Web Standards, and Idealism

at around evening time on Tuesday, the 18th of March 2008 by Chad

Joel on Software covers why IE8 will be awesome, everything the open source folks will want, and a failure.

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years. This debate precisely splits the world in two. If you have a way to buy stock in Internet flame wars, now would be a good time to do that.

Essentially this is the battle. There are the geeks. They set the “standards” and dictate the way software will work. They’ll ensure it has technical elegance, with a million different options to allow every user perfect customization of everything. Even though the option the user wanted is seventeen layers deep. A perfect example is software that converts one type of video format to another. MediaCoder is a great example. There are Muxer and WavPack, FLAC and APE, RLSMLS modes aplenty. Thousands of switches and options and pulldown menus. Perfect example of geek software.

The geeks are wrong. Almost always wrong.

I’m a geek. I’ve been doing this crap since 1981. I can write code in several different languages. I’ve built systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And I can’t figure out how to use MediaCoder to convert a video simply from whatever format it is in to the one I want.

I simply want to select a media file type, and as long as the codec exists on the computer I’m working on, it should be able to display. Then I simply choose: The output format, lets say WMV. I should be able to hit Go at this point and the software will figure the rest out by simply matching the screen size and audio format of what is there now. Or maybe I want to shrink it down, I should be able to select screen size, frame rate, and audio bandwidth. Or even better, I select a target file size and the software figures out the rest. That’s it, that’s what I want.

This is the problem with the new IE8. At this point the software purists have control of how internet “standards” will be followed. This makes the geeks rejoice, even though no browser meets these hypothetical standards. What it means for everyone is that most websites aren’t going to work properly.

Good luck with that…