On Fri, Apr 09, 2004 at 07:37:11PM +0000, Ian Hickson wrote:

> >> If two UAs can implement it, why would a third not be able to?

> > Because of cost. Not every browser vendor has such an enormous
> > manpower.
 
> Mozilla and Opera both have _extremely_ small development teams. If I
> recall correctly the core rendering engine team at Opera is no more
> than 6 people, and it is about the same number of people for Mozilla.

My definition of "small" is one person in his or her spare time.

That isn't realistic for a new desktop browser -- but there haven't been
many of those in a while.  (Safari is probably the most recent, and that
was partly a rebranding of khtml, rather than a completely new browser.)

For smaller devices, one hobbyist is often exactly what it available, at 
least as a bootstrap initial version.  For several years, reading on a 
palm pilot involved shareware or freeware, which didn't have 6 developers.

Most of these projects never got around to adding CSS support, because
there wasn't a small-but-obviously-useful chunk to start with; it was
huge-project or nothing.  Presentational html is supported, because it
could be done piecemeal.

And to be perfectly honest, if the standards are really only aimed at
multiple-full-time-developer projects, then why bother to standardize?
"What MSIE does", maybe coupled with "what Mozilla and Netscape do" 
would be just as useful.

-jJ