On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Niall Kavanagh wrote:
> 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.
I will agree with you there.
The Mozilla team was not working for Netscape, they were working for
themselves, as a good Open Source project should. Supporting propriatary
legacy code was pretty low on their list.
It is Netscape/AOL's responsibility to adapt their own branded product to
support their existing customer base. They may still do that; there is
nothing keeping them from adding support for the NS DOM.
I suspect that trying to support two DOMs at once is one of the things that
made the Netscape V5 codebase unmaintainable.
> <rant type="response" class="honestly agreeing with reservations">
Heh heh. When I wrote that, I was fighting various incarnations of
Microsoft Outlook in an attempt to get some form of standards compliance out
of them. After a week of that, the idea of supporting only the official,
published standards seemed like a pretty good strategy to me. :-)
> Until very recently NO browser has supported all the W3C standards.
Unfortunately true. This forces you to make a decision: Use only the
intersection of the standards currently implemented by the various popular
browsers, limiting what you can do, or develop browser-specific code with the
understanding that re-implementations will be a fact of life.
It pretty much sucks either way.
Of course, anytime you develop "above and beyond" the greatest common
factor, you have to make decisions on which "platforms" you are going to
support. Netscape, IE, Opera, Lynx? Java, JavaScript,
whatever-MS-is-pushing-this-month? "Modern" browsers only? NS and IE V3.x as
well? Exclude text-only and blind users by not developing text alternatives?
> Pedantic adherance to standards is not the norm on the web, and that's a
> sad fact of life.
Maybe that will change as people are forced to re-implement their pages over
and over again as more and different user agents (browsers) hit the scene.
> On that note, let me mention that IE has been far more standards compliant
> than any version of Netscape until Moz came along.
Indeed! Opera has been the standards leader, followed by IE. Netscape was
far, far behind. This annoys me greatly, both as a user and as the sometime
web developer.
> It'll be interesting to see what the next generation of IE can do
> head-to-head with Moz! ;)
If we are lucky, Mozilla will force a standards-compliance race, where each
company tries to one-up the other with "We're even more standards compliant
now!". Everyone wins, then.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| "Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are quick to anger, and |
| have not need of subtlety." |
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