::scr horns of a dilemma

[Simon Batistoni]

On 25/03/02 11:35 +0000, Simon Wistow wrote:
>
> So, the question I put to you, Vendor Specific Extensions - good thing
> or bad thing?

I'm not sure that's much of a question. Vendor Specific Extensions
suck, as many of us know all too well from hours of weeping, wailing
and the gnashing of teeth.

I think your java problem is subtly different to the problems we had
with proprietary HTML tags during the browser wars, though. For the
most part, the extensions which were made, particularly <marquee> and
<blink>, were unnecessary, and hideous. They didn't add anything
essential to the user experience, and they were vile.

Changes which were made elsewhere (there was mention in the pub last
night of the way in which, when IE v3 came out, it would render a
table with a missing </table> tag, whilst Netscape 3, correctly,
wouldn't) were also bad, because, while they made it easier for people
who were crap at HTML to write web pages, it led to people who were
crap at HTML writing web pages.

What I'm trying to say, is that most "additions" to HTML were
unnecessary, and broke things.

On the other hand, it would appear that what you have with J2ME is
something that's fundamentally shit. And the vendors, bless 'em, are
trying to do what they can to make it better. Penguin Patrol looks
way, way better when it's using the vendor-specific addons.

But to get a good game on three different vendors' phones, you're
likely going to have to code 3 versions. Which is bad. What *should*
be happening here is that the vendors should be clubbing together and
saying "oi! This is *shit*", and then working together on some openly
avaliable extensions which they all adopt.

I'm guessing that various market forces, inter-vendor spats, pride,
hope of becoming the "dominant player" etc etc are precluding this
happening.

The really frustrating thing is that, as a company who makes money off
these games, Atomic will have to insist that you put up with this
shit, and code 3 different versions of the game to cover the market.
The consumers won't have any idea of all this - Penguin Patrol runs on
their phone, regardless of make, and it's great - hurrah!

And the issue of who wrote what J2ME extensions won't be important to
the market as a whole, so the phone companies will end up not really
caring. Eventually, they might even adopt a central standard, or start
to move the APIs for their extensions closer to other vendors'
standards, until they're effectively the same.

And so you, as the programmer, get to carry all the load of the crap
decisions made about what went into J2ME and what didn't.

-- 
a robo-seal clubbing orgy of destruction