On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Derek Martin wrote:
> Anyway, as I recall, the majority of people on the Mozilla team were
> employees of netscape.
I knew someone would bring that up.
While they were in the pay of Netscape, the Mozilla team was working for the
Mozilla project. Just as Transmeta doesn't own Linux just because Linus
Torvalds works there, AOL doesn't own Mozilla just because the majority of the
developers work there.
Does AOL/Netscape have a strong influence in the design of Mozilla? I'm
sure they do. But ultimately, Mozilla is Mozilla, not Netscape.
> Exactly. Which is why I vote to stick to LCD standards.
<OFFTOPIC><PEDANTIC>
You mean GCF (Greatest Common Factor), that is, the highest level of
functionality supported among all involved. From mathematics, where the GCF is
the greatest factor (operand in a multiplication operation that will yield the
number in question) that is common to a set of numbers.
The LCD (Lowest Common Denominator) is from fractions. If I want to add
1/4 and 1/10, I need a common denominator (the bottom part). I could simply
multiply the bases to get 10/40 and 4/40, the common denominator being 40.
Alternatively, the Lowest Common Denominator is 20, with 5/20 and 2/20 being
the fractions.
</PEDANTIC></OFFTOPIC>
> 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.
Me too. But I'm an engineer, not a media arts type. :-)
>> 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.
Society doesn't have to; just management, when they find you re-implementing
your company webpage six times a year for eleven different browsers. More
manhours means more dollars, and that is one thing almost all managers
understand. It is simple economics: When it becomes cheaper to support
standards then it is to develop for a particular web browser, the standards
will win.
Don't think that will happen? Well, consider that all of the following
could be HTML user agents:
- Your desktop computer
- Your television
- Your phone
- Your walkman radio
- Your palmtop computer
- Your wristwatch
- Your car radio
- Your toaster
Once convergence actually starts to happen, I think web designers will be
forced to adhere to standards, or else cut out huge portions of their target
audience.
> 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...
I think you're being a little overly paranoid there. The W3C is no great
fan of Microsoft. I think it is better to say that Netscape's DOM (your
document is a set of layers) is really different from the model HTML lends
itself to (your document is a tree). (Yes, the parenthetical remarks are
gross over-simplifications.)
A lot of people have adopted Netscape as a champion of open source and
standards compliance. How quickly we forget. They were the ones that
originally perverted the HTML spec with all of the garbage we moan about
today. Netscape would have loved to be the next Microsoft, but they couldn't
pull it off. AOL is still trying -- and so far, they are doing pretty good.
The only good solution for *us*, the people who have to work with the
software, is standards compliance and open source software.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| Why isn't phonetically spelled that way? |
| Why is abbreviation such a long word? |
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