"Ron Garret" wrote in message
...
Of course they have. They may not have been formally accused of this,
but that MS engages in such tactics is common knowledge.

"Common knowledge" is a lot like "common sense". Except that it's the
second word that's in short supply, rather than the first.

But you are confusing three different issues:

No, YOU are confusing those issues with something that is relevant to this
discussion. They are not relevant at all.

No, they aren't. But I concede that this particular problem is not the
result of an MS conspiracy.

Well, your claim that it is was is what I refuted in your post. I guess
that wraps this up.

[...]
That is a very short sighted view. Breaking standards has long-term
negative consequences far beyond the immediate gratification of having a
video play.

Or maybe not...you're still arguing about it.

There's no standard that says that the media player SHOULD NOT play a file
that it recognizes. The standards only describe what the media player (or
other software) SHOULD do.

It doesn't "break" a standard to play a file even when the standard doesn't
provide sufficient information to play it. The only entity that "broke" the
standard was the one that didn't conform to it in the first place (e.g. the
web developer, web site, web server, etc.)

All the media player does is to try to make an educated guess as to what was
actually intended, thus providing the end user with the experience they
expect in spite of the erroneous data.

HTTP was first described by Berners-Lee et al. in RFC 1945 in May 1996.
Windows95 first shipped in August 1995. So if Windows was not the
predominant OS when HTTP was invented, what was? OS/2?

First of all, his work predates the publication date by a significant
amount. Secondly, even in 1996 it is not my recollection that Windows held
even 50% of the total market share for operating systems. Only five years
earlier, Windows was still struggling to get over the legacy of versions 1.0
and 2.0. Plenty of people were still using DOS (Windows most significant
competitor at the time), and a host of other options.

[...]
It is among the findings of fact in United States versus Microsoft.
(Also, I'm fairly certain, in Sun Microsystems v. Microsoft in the Java
lawsuit.)

If you're going to state that as fact, I assume you have citations to back
it up. There were plenty of accusations reported in the press, but I never
heard one that complained about Microsoft's software tolerating poor
third-party developers better than their competitors.

Pete