Sleep Spent

When people ask me why I don’t like Microsoft, I have a bunch of default gripes. “Their software sucks.” “They are monopolistic.” “They don’t obey standards.” Not the sort of things that get people riled up, by and large. You need to be a pretty big geek to feel deeply about something like web standards, right?

But what if, by abusing web standards, Microsoft managed to do something worse than break CSS Zen Garden? What if they caused more harm than just some incompatibility and a few broken links?

What if they cost people a whole shitload of money?

(You’ll want to read the earlier post first for some background on this.)

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I found this article about a year ago and was entralled for an evening. Slashdot just picked it up, reminding me how much I enjoy metric. This is a particularly amazing detail:

Technical drawing pens follow the same size-ratio principle. The standard sizes differ by a factor sqrt(2): 2.00 mm, 1.40 mm, 1.00 mm, 0.70 mm, 0.50 mm, 0.35 mm, 0.25 mm, 0.18 mm, 0.13 mm. So after drawing with a 0.35 mm pen on A3 paper and reducing it to A4, you can continue with the 0.25 mm pen. (ISO 9175-1)

The obsessive-compulsive in me swoons at that level of order!

Standards, be they web or metric get me all tingly.