Die Opera Show

Interesting that the big Z doesn't (claim to) know why the web standards argument won.

As he says, this is about ways of thinking and ways of doing things, not about some artificial ("religious" in his words) and arbitrary perfection.

But I think one of the reasons that standards are important is that they let you keep control of your data. If you are keeping your information in a system that depends on a particular product - even on a particular browser - then you assume they will last as long as you need them to. But if you are basing your work on standards, then you only assume that *someone* will implement the standards for as long as you nee them, and particular tools can come and go without meaning more than a change of your software - your information is stil usable even if a company like Netscape disappears (which it did).

This is of course one of the reasons Opera believes in making standards, in offering its new work for standardisation (e.g. the widget work. Although many people were developing widget systems around the same time, it took Opera to go to the W3C and propose working on a standard to get the situation where there is a common framework people are starting to implement already in different systems that were originally incompatible).

Of course, we plan to be around in the future too. But providing an ecosystem that customers can trust even if something terrible happens and we decide to make music videos instead of browsers is important. And so standards really matter...

spoken well, chaals