Today, Benjamin Scott gleaned this insight:
> 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.
IIRC, that isn't entirely true. Of course, my memory on ALL of the
things I'm about to comment on is a bit weak, so perhaps you should take
this entire message for the grain of salt it's worth... ;)
Anyway, as I recall, the majority of people on the Mozilla team were
employees of netscape.
> 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.
While this is true, I suspect you run into complexity issues. Meaning
that if they tried to implement EVERYTHING, what you'd end up with is a
crufty browser that kinda worked, but not really.
> I suspect that trying to support two DOMs at once is one of the things that
> made the Netscape V5 codebase unmaintainable.
Ah! If I'd read ahead, I wouldn't have needed to type that last bit...
> > 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.
Yeah. Again, as I recall, the reason for this is that each of the browser
vendors were implementing thier own features, and trying to get the W3C to
incorporate those features into the standard, with varying degrees of
success. It boils down to politics. So what you end up with is several
products (and companies) that do different things, and to similar things
differently; also known as a giant CF.
Politics suck.
> 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?
Exactly. Which is why I vote to stick to LCD standards. There are some
really cool features, and sometimes they make things a lot better for
both the developer and the target audience. But supporting everyone
isn't easy. Niall and I had this discussion the other day. I personally
prefer function over form 97.325% of the time (yeah I have to be
different) so I'd rather make the page a little less pretty and more
standards conformant.
Marketing types tend to go the other way... (subtle dig :)
> > 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.
I'd like to see it, but I doubt it. People often learn from their
mistakes, but history has shown that societies as a whole don't. Oh well.
So we're all doomed...
> > 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.
Well, this goes back to the race for dominance, both in terms of defining
the standard and in terms of winning market share, which really are the
same thing. Netscape had it, and Microsoft stole it. I believe they also
were able to use their clout to influence the W3C to incorporate their
features into the standards, where Netscape was less successful. But I
may just be smoking crack again...
> 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.
That would be ideal, but I still have my doubts.
--
PGP/GPG Public key at http://cerberus.ne.mediaone.net/~derek/pubkey.txt
------------------------------------------------------
Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------------------------------
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
