"L. David Baron" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message [EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]... > What's the big advantage of drop-in components anyway? What's wrong with > allowing people to redistribute a new layout dll that has mathml built in? > (Yes, drop-in components would be nicer, but are the worth a significant > performance cost for the cost of an installation that only happens once?)
Because we today have MathML, SVG and XUL. People are already working on ChemicalML, MoleculeML, MusicML, etc. Each of the will have to built into the source code of layout/content. Ultimately we have to make plugable markup languages based on XML namespaces. Componentizing also allows the development of these languages to proceed independently of Mozilla. If Mozilla 1.0 ships without SVG, when SVG ships it will cause an immediate fork in the Mozilla browser base, those with SVG and those without. The later SVG capable Mozilla may also have a bunch of bugs fixed it other areas causing bigger incompatibilities. I need to see some numbers to substantiate that virtual functions are 15% of layout time. In my experience with layout engines the dominate time consumer is measuring text. > That said, people are thinking about how to make layout extensible. > However, the solution is not sprinkling |virtual| all over the code in the > hopes that the layout engine will eventually be slow enough that it's > extensible. :-) It should be neither necessary nor sufficient. Sprinkling virtual is not the solution. Designing an IDL file is the correct solution. -- Jon Smirl [EMAIL PROTECTED]
