Comments on: Giving thanks https://quoderat.megginson.com/2006/05/15/giving-thanks/ Open information and technology. Sun, 01 Aug 2010 22:43:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: david https://quoderat.megginson.com/2006/05/15/giving-thanks/#comment-467 Wed, 17 May 2006 09:11:59 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archives/2006/05/15/giving-thanks/#comment-467 Thanks for the comment, David. Like you, I’m glad that the problem with the W3C spec was a clerical error — MS definitely deserves to be in the credits list — but at the same time, it’s very arbitrary how we choose who should get credit for innovations and inventions, whether it’s Tim B-L for the Web, Linus Torvalds for Linux, or (on a much smaller scale) me for SAX.

You pointed out nicely the problem with DOM — Netscape invented it, but you’d prefer to give the main credit to the W3C and MS for adding the events model. That’s fair enough, but it’s worth recognizing that others might just as reasonably prefer to give most of the credit for XMLHttpObject to the Mozilla, Safari, and Opera people, who took what was a proprietary, MSIE-specific ActiveX control that almost no one used and found a way to make it cross-browser, cross-platform, and reliable, while staying almost 100% compatible with MSIE. I’m neutral on both questions myself, because (as I mentioned in my posting) I don’t believe that it usually makes sense to give any individual or company the main credit for something like this — it’s always a shared process.

]]> By: M. David Peterson https://quoderat.megginson.com/2006/05/15/giving-thanks/#comment-466 Wed, 17 May 2006 03:12:40 +0000 http://www.megginson.com/blogs/quoderat/archives/2006/05/15/giving-thanks/#comment-466 The post was made because of what seemed blatant disregard for the fact that it was Microsoft that originally developed the technology that the XMLHttpRequest Object specification was attempting to bring together the various implementations since then and make an after the fact specification to help bind them together. There were more than several posts before mine from folks at MS who were more than a bit upset by the fact that they didn’t even get so much as a mention for what they originally pioneered. Whether they blew it off because people weren’t using it all that much, only later to be brought back to life by Mozilla is not justification for suggesting they shouldn’t at very least be given credit for the development of the object that everyone else would later implement themselves, to then popularize.

Also, its DHTML that is of significance here. DOM is a W3C standard that MS had a part in developing and implementing. Netscape may have originally pioneered the original idea, but the original idea compared to its more modern day equivalent are not even comparable. DHTML goes beyond the DOM and brings together the events model that allows for all of what AJAX is capable of in the first place.

So whats your point, David? It’s okay to ignore those who pioneer technology because they decided that because nobody seemed interested it wasnt worth attempting to market it a bit more?

Credit IS deserved for what they brought to the table. They were left out of the credits, and as we have come to discover since then, this was a clerical error… Which in many ways was EXACTLY what I had hoped to uncover with the post in the first place.

Did I do that? Yep. Is attribution a reasonable request from those who pioneered a technology? Yep.

So whats the problem?

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