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Comment by grantheaslip | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, what Microsoft did was arguably worse, but I generally agree: Apple and Google are industry darlings, and because of this are getting away with things people would be crying bloody murder over if Microsoft did them.

I get the distinct sense that a lot of people don’t really care about web standards so much as they care about their favourite company controlling standards. If it were Microsoft who was forging ahead with new features, would the MacBook-wielding, Gmail-using technorati be so enthusiastic?

I’m not even entirely against the new -webkit- stuff, I just hate the hypocrisy from people who claim to be all for web standards, except for when there’s a shiny new feature that only works in Safari, Chrome, and iOS. Microsoft has arguably been doing the best job of respecting web standards since IE9, and they get very little credit for it.

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I think you're right. Today I've been reading the exact opposite of what people were saying about IE a decade ago.

I just hate the hypocrisy from people who claim to be all for web standards, except for when there’s a shiny new feature that only works in Safari, Chrome, and iOS.

I'm right there with you. For a while I've been coming to realize that the standards never actually mattered for these folks, its just that "IE6 doesn't conform to standards" made a more convincing argument for firefox than the real reason which was "IE6 is a pain in the ass and I hate it."

Now the people who want the new hotness are realizing that the standards they tied themselves to have become an albatross. If they actually ever gave a shit about standards, they would have been pitching ideas about how to update the standardization process to work with today's implementation realities. They actually would have been doing it along the way, and we would have never ended up where we are now.

I may be taking this too far, but I think there’s more to it than IE. Many in the “hacker” community seem to wrap themselves in the flag of “open”, but only when it’s in their favour.

It’s the people who argue for a decentralized, open-source alternative to Facebook, but embrace Google+. It’s the people who explain how terrible it is to tie your business to a single vendor, but decide to build businesses on iOS. It’s the people who tell you they would never put any personal documents on the cloud, but embrace Dropbox. It’s the people who claim to support open, DRM-free data formats and think the Khan Academy is the future of education, but think iBooks textbooks are great.

Like I said, I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to open source and open data formats — I just hate the way people use openness and standards as a prop. Saying standards aren’t necessary when WebKit has neat new features is (loosely) analogous to only supporting democracy when the party you vote for wins.

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