hutcheson - 4:34 am on Jul 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

>can IE truly reconcile the two DOMs?
Highly doubtful. I've worked on complex programs (optimizing compilers are probably comparable to rendering engines in complexity, with people who (I believe) had a clue as to what they were doing, and cared to document it. I think I know what Microsoft would be like if they had any such people, and that is not what they look like. I have never seen any evidence that anyone at Microsoft actually knew what the programs were doing--the most they can ever tell you is wherein your program using a MS DLL differs from the one sample test case that the in-house developers managed to make work; but if they document stuff, they'd feel customer pressure to fix it when it doesn't work (and, of course, odium when they didn't.) But now they face nothing like that, because nobody on earth can prove their garbage is supposed to act any other way than it does.

>do they want reconciliation?
No, absolutely not. What does it gain them to encourage people to use a standard? (Even reputable market-leaders don't encourage standards.) Better, far better for THEM, to utilize their monopoly on browsers-shipped-with-new-computers to ensure standards-conforming websites won't work for most of the lower-quartile of internet users -- thus forcing people to code to the moving target (shambling mound) that is IE.

>if not, what will they do?
Nothing. Patch security symptoms without raising a finger to touch the REAL technical problem (ActiveX and supervisor mode) or the REAL social problem (too many "reputable" companies demand that people go through wierd internet processes to run simple programs, so people get used to saying "OK" to any insane request, because Microsoft et al make so many of them.)