2003-10-28 09:45 UTC Spotting vendor lock-in
Here is a quick guide that should help you recognise languages designed to encourage vendor lock-in from those designed to encourage innovation and interoperability.
| Good | Bad |
|---|---|
| Encourages healthy competition, innovation, and interoperability | Encourages vendor lock-in, stiffles competition, breaks interoperability |
| Built on open standards such as DOM2 Core and DOM2 Events. | Reinvents existing standards such as DOM in completely different ways. |
| Extends existing standards such as CSS in forward-compatible, working-group-approved ways that do not break compliant UAs. | Extends existing W3C standards such as XML Namespaces in incompatible ways that, e.g., make it impossible to correctly parse the XML using standard tools. |
| Extends existing ECMA standards such as ECMAScript in incompatible ways that, e.g., make it impossible to execute the new language in compliant interpreters. | |
| Invents new technologies and proposes them to standards organisations, accepting feedback and incorporating it into the final standard and the implementation. | Reinvents technologies that are currently in the standardisation process and keeps them completely proprietary. |
| Actively encourages other vendors to reimplement the technology in compatible ways. | Integrates the technology into so many other vendor-specific technologies that no other vendor can hope to implement it. |