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Why Browsers Haven't Standardized
Page 4 —
New Rules!
The arc and circle specification is published as a public draft,
generating all sorts of media attention and whipping Web designers
into a frenzy as they wait to use this cool new language. Meanwhile,
UltraBrowserCorp, which has an employee in the Working Group, is
getting ready to release the next version of their browser. Since
everything in the arc specification seems relatively stable, and the Web
community seems to want it, they include the arc-description features in
the new release. It's a big hit with cutting-edge designers who start
putting arcs in all of their Web pages, and the media has nothing but
praise for the new technology. Everybody's happy: Web designers love
the new toy, marketing departments and CEOs like the positive media
attention, and the UltraBrowserCorp programmers feel they've contributed
something positive to the evolution of the Web.
Then, a month or so later, disaster strikes. After a long, heated debate
in the Working Group, it's decided that instead of beginning at the top of
the circle and moving clockwise, arcs will start from the right side of the
circle and go counter-clockwise. After all, that's the way it's done in
mathematical expressions involving radians, and thus it falls more in line
with established theoretical practice. Degrees will remain a valid unit of
measure, but they'll be translated to radians.
So the 180-degree example given before would now result in a browser
drawing the top half of a circle, not the right half - a rather large
difference in the defined behaviors of the specification. And the browser corporation, which
designed its new release around the compass-based orientation system for
the arc language, is expected to support the change.
This 11th-hour "tweak" is perfectly valid under the current rules of
the W3C: Any aspect of a specification can change up until the time it
becomes a full Recommendation. Specifications aren't supposed to alter much
during the Proposed Recommendation phase, but they do anyway. CSS2, for
example, underwent a great many changes during this period.
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