On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> From what I understand, the Mozilla team discovered a few things when they
> were building Navigator V5 (yes, five). The first was that the entire current
> Navigator codebase (which is a direct linear descendant of NCSA Mosaic) was
> completely unworkable and would have to be scrapped. Hence, this release is
> Navigator V6. The second was that, frankly, the Netscape DOM was a
> non-standard mess, and implementing it all over again would (1) be a waste of
> time and (2) actually be counter-productive, because it is totally
> non-standard.
>
And I think they absolutely did the right thing by re-writing and
implementing standards. However, if a company puts out products that cause
a certain infrastructure to be formed they have a responsibility to
support that infrastructure.
> <RANT LEVEL=MILD>
>
> Don't develop for web browsers. Develop for the W3C specifications. If you
> make the mistake of tying yourself to a specific browser, then you should
> expect to get bitten when things change. Microsoft has taught us this lesson
> again and again: When you lock yourself into a proprietary solution, you will
> be forced to start over repeatedly.
>
> I have no sympathy for people who follow proprietary "standards" and then
> complain when they turn out to be proprietary.
>
> </RANT>
>
<rant type="response" class="honestly agreeing with reservations">
Until very recently NO browser has supported all the W3C standards. The
reality of the situation is that there is a lot of code out there that
will simply stop working once Netscape 6 hits the fan. Pedantic adherance
to standards is not the norm on the web, and that's a sad fact of life.
Creating HTML pages that adhere to the standards has never been a problem;
creating web application that make full use of feature sets has.
Developing said applications means making use of the technologies
available *now*, whether they are standardized or not.
It's reasonable to expect code re-implementations when you walk the edge.
I happen to think it's also reasonable to provide backwards-compatibility
or rudimentry upgrade paths. It doesn't look like Netscape will do this.
</rant>
On that note, let me mention that IE has been far more standards compliant
than any version of Netscape until Moz came along. It'll be interesting to
see what the next generation of IE can do head-to-head with Moz! ;)
--
Niall Kavanagh, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
News, articles, and resources for web professionals and developers:
http://www.kst.com
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