Hacker News Reader

> but the result was an actual standard

Was it though? At a minimum i think a "standard" is a document detailing the behaviour of at least two competiting implementations sufficiently that you could use it to make a new implementation that was interopable. I don't think that was true of W3C standards in the pre WHATWG days. Compare it to say the HTTP rfcs, which i think did meet that standard.

View on HN

Not necessarily. The C++ standards committee for instance happily standardizes features with only one (or zero) existing implementations.

It has to, because such implementations would be extensions that standard compliant code can't rely on.

Opera would be a good example of a third independent implementation successfully competing with the primary two (IE and NN/Mozilla). I remember switching browsers back and forth several times back then - I was an Opera 6 user, then moved to Firebird/Firefox shortly after it was released, then back to Opera 7/8/9, then to Chrome.

It was a fairly brief period, unfortunately - roughly between IE losing definitive market dominance, and Chrome acquiring the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com