February 13, 2005

How to properly approach critcism and walk away with dignity intact - or - How Mr. Håkon Wium Lie just won over a *HUGE* amount of my respect from his comments to my post contending his viewpoint

Yesterday I posted a question of sorts wondering why it was that Microsoft had taken such a strange and hard stance against future IE6 upgrades wondering if this had anything to do with the settlement a few years back with the Fed's (US-based). I then proceeded to take a few of the points that Mr. Lie made in his "Opera to MS: Get real about interoperability, Mr Gates" post on The Register yesterday to task.

I am now going to post Mr. Lie's response, with a *GOLD STAR* I might add, on my refrigerator as a reminder on how to:

a) roll with the humor punches, avoiding comments or jabs back at the attempted comedian,

b) accept and respect the inherent criticism to then,

c) resist the temptation to defend the viewpoint, instead deflecting the comments by bringing out what the real point of the post was which was,

d) that MS implements poor HTML output that is rarely standards compliant and most often sloppy such that it may look Ok in IE given IE's embrace of rendering sloppy code to look half way decent to then look like crap in other browser because they did't take the time to rendered standards compliant HTML.

In his response Mr. Lie also links back to his personal page on the Opera site in which I had never seen before. After reading it I feel like we're old time chums from back in the day. WOW! Now that is a fine example of how to "keep things real"!

Not that I have ever disrepected Mr. Lie in any way whatsoever. Well I guess my comments yesterday showed some disprespect... but I am repenting of my evil ways. I still believe my client/server points are valid but I could honestly care less at this point as the way Mr. Lie handled even my "chop" at his name with dignity and humor was remarkable. And after visiting his personal page on the Opera site I am left here quiet with a whole new respect for Mr. Lie and for his company. I already had a lot of respect for Opera. Now I have more.

Thank you Mr. Lie for helping me see things from a different angle.

Now, about Opera's support for client-side XSLT -- What can we (the XSLT development community) do to help make that happen? ;)