By Joel, I mean Joel Spolsky. Not only does he have great taste in presidential candidates, but he's a person everyone in technology should be reading.
It's good to have idols, I think. I dream of having the perspective and wisdom to write like this.
The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decision that lies perfectly, exactly, precisely on the fault line smack in the middle of two different ways of looking at the world. It’s the difference between conservatives and liberals, it’s the difference between "idealists" and "realists", it’s a huge global jihad dividing members of the same family, engineers against computer scientists, and Lexuses vs. olive trees.
Of course he's talking about how IE8 will handle web standards when so much of the world expects IE to work the way it has always worked. Is there a solution? According to Joel:
There is no solution. Each solution is terribly wrong. Eric Bangeman at ars technica writes, "The IE team has to walk a fine line between tight support for W3C standards and making sure sites coded for earlier versions of IE still display correctly." This is incorrect. It’s not a fine line. It's a line of negative width. There is no place to walk. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
His Martian headset analogy is just a bit forced, but totally forgiven. The write-up is brilliant and fascinating.
Like Joel, I'm going to sit back with some popcorn.
...it will be really, really entertaining to watch...
