A personal anecdote involving Dean Edwards - some remember his work very well. He was an early adopter of Javascript and fixed IE6 using a self-made JS library specific to IE6. Here's what he did:
dean.edwards.name/IE7/usage/
Talk about thinking outside a box (model) I HAD TO sorry!
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He came at this very early in the game. It absolutely stunned me at the time, as JS was not at all a "First" in the open Web stack. We first met up for coffee in London. He tended to be socially to himself except when with progressive thinkers working to fix the IE6 shut down.
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If folks don't remember the issues with IE6, the problem was down to some folks at Microsoft including Bill Gates who said right to my face "We have standards! Look at our XML!" I had to laugh because of course XHTML was emerging too. IE6 had no implementation to serve it as XML!
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At the same time, there were internal people there who not only knew standards, but were making them. Notably, the ever awesome @cwilso who should be sainted along with others on the inside who actually bled out during that time inside. I got to go home not bleeding at all.
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The point is it took many ideas to initiate change. And it happened. IE6 was really a business related choice by a few that ultimately lost them market share but led to the death of their own rendering engine, which actually had always been ahead of the game in CSS and DOM.
Apr 12, 2020 · 11:06 AM UTC
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Many hands x ideas from highly unique thinkers made freely available, there are so many names there's a frankenbook in there. But it was a rich time because of what: DIVERSITY. Not Monoculture or duality, which affects our Web and World to this day.
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Funny aside: There was an AJAX conference where @BrendanEich was asked by an audience member during a panel. I and Chris and several others from the standardista world were there. "How do we fix the ie6 issue?" Brendan hit the mic and said "Dean Edwards Dean Edwards Dean Edwards"
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I nearly lost it laughing my ass off. Here's the father of JS looking to an unconventional use and seeing it also as a point of opening a door to more interop for the at-the-time most dominant browser in the world.
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So yes of course the individual in any system process matters, but it was the many not the few who had to do the real hard work. I remain in awe of those many folks within and outside. It took a lot of people from different ideals to open a few minds to enormous change.
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Fast forward to JS-First/Framework-First development and no browser diversity and we are worse off than before. Monoculture does not promote interoperabilty in software, nor in society. Binary thinking has also hurt us. DOM breakage in IE (correct) and Netscape (<layer> WTF?)
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