Steve Holden wrote: [80/20 rule]
> This is as much an economic decision as a marketing one, but a good engineer > knows instinctively that there is a desirable cut-off point beyond which > adding further functionality is a waste of engineering effort. But Mike Meyer's point was that the Web standards are designed to allow fancy functionality where it's available but for the experience to degrade gracefully where such functionality isn't available. For example, you have all the "events module" attributes in XHTML, but take away the events capability in the browser and there's a decent chance for the semantics of the application to remain the same: no, you don't get instant updates of the page when you select some menu item, but the user can still have a similar experience which involves slightly more inconvenience - they have to submit the page and get back an updated version from the server. It's misleading to claim that designing in such a way requires huge additional development, especially since the standards are constructed in such a way to facilitate such designs. It goes without saying that implementing advanced functionality on Netscape 3.x and NCSA Mosaic would be a costly and ultimately non-viable burden, but that isn't the issue for many Web applications and wasn't the point being made. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
