Ashar-
Wikipedia being NPOV I don't think we should enter
the war. Moreover
saying "this site is best seen with firefox / opera" will just mean to
IE users that we are lazy webmasters that didn't want to put any effort
in supporting multi browsers (which is false, ask gwicke about css
tweaking).
Agreed. However, we should prominently state that Wikimedia is best viewed
using a browser that supports web standards A, B, C and D. We could then
have an information page (table) that shows which browser supports which
standards.
The problem with the browser monopoly is that Microsoft can exercise
control over standards. It is this control which matters to us and to
everyone else, and making people aware of that fact is perfectly fair and
neutral. We should give our readers the necessary information to take
control. As long as Microsoft supports all these standards, everything is
fine and they will have an "X" in all the table columns.
In the near future, SVG should be one of these standards - as soon as it
becomes part of the mainline builds for Firefox and Mozilla. SVG is really
important to enable things like animations (without non-scalable and 256-
color limited GIFs) and interactive timelines. The current timelines are
nice, but SVG makes them zoomable and adds potential for other features
which you find in timeline systems of CD-ROM encyclopedias. Note that
basic SVGs are already generated, if you view the image for a timeline you
can substitute ".png" in the URL with ".svg".
XForms may also provide us with some benefits, although that is probably
of more interest to Wikidata where form entry verification is desirable.
Switching to full XHTML will be important if we ever want to add WYSIWYG
support, as it will enable us to convert back and forth between wiki-
syntax and XHTML.
I have no idea what Microsoft's long term plans are for these standards.
See, I'm perfectly neutral. ;-)
Regards,
Erik