I’m writing this Wednesday morning (except for a bit below about Mozilla,
which I wrote on Tuesday but wasn’t able to post). As of right now, the U.S. Presidential election is too close to call.
Whichever candidate gets Florida will likely win the election (barring some
bizarre upset when the Electoral College meets). Florida’s margins are so close
that the state is legally required to do a recount, and the absentee ballots
(which have already been cast but may not have arrived yet) may be enough to
affect which way things go.
Now that it’s over, I’ll come out and say that I’m hoping Al Gore won, and
I’m very irritated at Ralph Nader who may turn out to have cost Mr Gore the
election. Third parties simply are not practical ways to get political points
across. Without an immense popular base (which Mr Nader never had, despite
all his talk about how he was running to win), the best a third party can hope
for is to do no harm to the campaign of politically-similar candidates. The
worst is to throw the election to the candidate with the most dissimilar views,
thereby actually making things worse. Mr Nader acts as though four years of
George Bush would help his cause by being so anti-consumer and anti-environment
that people will flock to the Green Party for a change. Somehow, he has managed
to be simultaneously cynical and delusional. Without a better voting scheme, the
Greens will never be anything more than spoilers.
(Update: It’s now more than 24 hours since the polls closed and we
still don’t know who won. Mr Gore has a lead in the popular
vote, but of course that doesn’t actually count for
anything. We might not know who won until the actual Electoral College vote.)
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More evidence that Netscape Navigator 6 is not the same as Mozilla
Apparently, Netscape 6
is not fully standards-compliant due to a number
of bugs—some painfully obvious, like the inability to nest definition lists
correctly. The linked article provides ten examples of these bugs. Some of these
bugs are already fixed but Netscape won’t include the fixes in their
release.
I can understand the reluctance to accept a fix that potentially creates
other problems, but some of the justifications used by the Product Development
Team are pretty flimsy. Like, they can’t fix a misspelled error message because
it would “break
localization” (i.e., translation into other languages). As one participant put it,
“how often do people translate mispellings while localizing?”
My feeling here is, if you’re going to wait several years to release a
product, it’s best to release one that actually works. That being said, the vast
improvement over Netscape 4 is welcome. (via Zeldman)
Followup: Since I wrote the above, MozillaZine has posted a
tirade against those who would dare criticize
Mozilla, largly missing Mr Flanagan’s point that if you announce that
you’re going to release the most standards-compliant browser ever and then you
spend several years working on it while continuing to update your old, crappy
browser, it doesn’t look good if your new product accidently destroys table
formatting if someone tries to modify the table with Javascript—especially if
there’s a fix for the bug already.
In its response, the Web Standards Project
(which was also slammed by MozillaZine, apparently because of past criticism) points
out that it is Netscape which is making Mozilla look bad, by releasing a browser
which still has serious bugs and which most people will use to judge the success
of the Mozilla project.
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Also
Doc Searls points out Microsith, which is well worth
wandering through. (The Sith being the evil forces in the Star Wars
movies.)
Elsewhere, Dave Barry
demonstrates a good sense of priority.
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