火星人的耳机[转载]

《Martian Headsets》 - 火星人的耳机。
一篇很有趣的文章。
看完后确实觉得IE8和火星人的耳机有些关系。

原文链接：http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html 。
翻译链接：http://luoshengblog.cn/archives/martian-headsets 。

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Martian Headsets
This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Monday, March 17, 2008
You’re about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. It’ll make the Battle of Stalingrad look like that time your sister-in-law stormed out of afternoon tea at your grandmother’s and wrapped the Mustang around a tree.

This upcoming battle will be presided over by Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft veteran currently running the team that’s going to bring you the next version of Internet Explorer, 8.0. The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decision that lies perfectly, exactly, precisely on the fault line smack in the middle of two different ways of looking at the world. It’s the difference between conservatives and liberals, it’s the difference between “idealists” and “realists,” it’s a huge global jihad dividing members of the same family, engineers against computer scientists, and Lexuses vs. olive trees.

And there’s no solution. But it will be really, really entertaining to watch, because 99% of the participants in the flame wars are not going to understand what they’re talking about. It’s not just entertainment: it’s required reading for every developer who needs to design interoperable systems.

The flame war will revolve around the issue of something called “web standards.” I’ll let Dean introduce the problem:

All browsers have a “Standards” mode, call it “Standards mode,” and use it to offer a browser’s best implementation of web standards. Each version of each browser has its own Standards mode, because each version of each browser improves on its web standards support. There’s Safari 3’s Standards mode, Firefox 2’s Standards mode, IE6’s Standards mode, and IE7’s Standards mode, and they’re all different. We want to make IE8’s Standards mode much, much better than IE7’s Standards mode.
And the whole problem hinges on the little tiny decision of what IE8 should do when it encounters a page that claims to support “standards”, but has probably only been tested against IE7.

What the hell is a standard?

Don’t they have standards in all kinds of engineering endeavors? (Yes.)

Don’t they usually work? (Mmmm…..)

Why are “web standards” so frigging messed up? (It’s not just Microsoft’s fault. It’s your fault too. And Jon Postel’s (1943-1998). I’ll explain that later.)

There is no solution. Each solution is terribly wrong. Eric Bangeman at ars technica writes, “The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly.” This is incorrect. It’s not a fine line. It’s a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

That’s why I can’t take sides on this issue and I’m not going to. But every working software developer should understand, at least, how standards work, how standards should work, how we got into this mess, so I want to try to explain a little bit about the problem here, and you’ll see that it’s the same reason Microsoft Vista is selling so poorly, and it’s the same issue I wrote about when I referred to the Raymond Chen camp (pragmatists) at Microsoft vs. the MSDN camp (idealists), the MSDN camp having won, and now nobody can figure out where their favorite menu commands went in Microsoft Office 2007, and nobody wants Vista, and it’s all the same debate: whether you are an Idealist (”red”) or a Pragmatist (”blue”).

Let me start at the beginning. Let’s start by thinking about how to get things to work together.

What kinds of things? Anything, really. A pencil and a pencil sharpener. A telephone and a telephone system. An HTML page and a web browser. A Windows GUI application and the Windows operating system. Facebook and a Facebook Application. Stereo headphones and stereos.

At the point of contact between those two items, there are all kinds of things that have to be agreed, or they won’t work together.

I’ll work through a simple example.

Imagine that you went to Mars, where you discovered that the beings who live there don’t have the portable music player. They’re still using boom boxes.

........

还有图片这里就不贴了。

原文链接：http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

翻译链接：http://luoshengblog.cn/archives/martian-headsets