"naive" has never been the standard spelling; it's just a result of people that don't know how to make an umlaut using a keyboard, or people that try too hard to use words they can't spell much less know the meaning of
>>12
Spelling and pronunciation aren't very strongly correlated in English.
ï isn't a long ee, though. It's just a regular-length i sound. The diaeresis only indicates separation from the preceding vowel.
>>17
I loathe descriptivism/anti-prescriptivism, but I fully accept ``naive'' as a valid alternative spelling. A lot of dictionaries even consider ``naïve'' to be the variant and ``naive'' the prototype.