While I agree that in the common case entensibility will often be used for evil, it can also drive progress and innovation.
To play Devil's Advocate though, there are many examples that can be brought out in favor of extensibility.
For one, XMLHtttp was invented by Microsoft back in the IE4 (I believe, though maybe it was IE5) days. The amount of AJAX we use today was entirely possible back then, as long as you were willing to limit yourself to the Microsoft browser.
If you always limit yourself to the standard, you'll never end up moving forward. The IE5 spec timeline only projects a finished spec in 2020. Do you think that by 2020 we won't have leapt leaps and bounds ahead of what the HTML5 spec aimed to standardize?
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While I agree that in the common case entensibility will often be used for evil, it can also drive progress and innovation.
To play Devil's Advocate though, there are many examples that can be brought out in favor of extensibility.
For one, XMLHtttp was invented by Microsoft back in the IE4 (I believe, though maybe it was IE5) days. The amount of AJAX we use today was entirely possible back then, as long as you were willing to limit yourself to the Microsoft browser.
If you always limit yourself to the standard, you'll never end up moving forward. The IE5 spec timeline only projects a finished spec in 2020. Do you think that by 2020 we won't have leapt leaps and bounds ahead of what the HTML5 spec aimed to standardize?