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Comment by yanw | Hacker News Reader

"Breaking away" as you describe it sounds like innovation to me, and pacing innovation to standard bodies would kill it. I can't think of specifics but surly most of what is considered the standard today was once the experimentation of one company or one lab.

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Really? When Microsoft "broke away" and created ActiveX, you were in support of that too because it was innovation? Or how bout Adobe and Flash?

ActiveX and Flash were certainly innovations. One of them didn't pan out[1] and the other did and lasted for quite some time.

You realize that if not for Flash, sites like Youtube wouldn't have been possible at the time that it was released?

[1] ActieX didn't pan out for the web as a whole - it fared well behind the walls of enterprises.

If Microsoft made ActiveX open and easy for other browser manufactures to implement in a cross-platform manner, I would absolutely have been in support of it. They didn't, so I wasn't.

Standards bodies move slowly. Non-standardised innovation across browsers is absolutely to be encouraged, as long as it is done in a manner that allows others to implement that innovation too. This sort of innovation is what helps us decide what is worth being made into a standard.

Maybe not ActiveX, but when Microsoft created XMLHttpRequest in their javascript engine, that ended up being pretty significant and great for how the web works today.

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