Roland M�sl wrote:
> You want to call new features second class?
> You are really an arrogant fundamentalist.
>
It is my belief that "new features" implemented in a proprietary manner
without any backing from an officially recognized Standards body are not
only second-class, they are fundamentally harmful to the primary
objective of the World Wide Web. The WWW was always intended to be an
open community, *accessible to anyone*. It's the "write once, view
anywhere by anyone" vision which has made the Web grow so quickly.
However, companies such as Microsoft which use their overwhelming user
base to implement new "features" are effectively limiting web sites to a
subset of Web users. It doesn't matter if that subset is 85% or even
99%; if even one user is unable to experience the bounty of the Web,
then that is unacceptable.
"Freedom for all" is what it's about. "Freedom for everybody, except
that guy over there, but who cares about him anyway" is just not
acceptable in my mind.
I have no problem with innovative features, mind you. I simply believe
that they should not be used on the Web until they are part of an
official recommendation by an industry-recognized standards body, most
notably the W3C. Undergoing the official standards process ensures that
there are no interoperability problems between that and other
standardized technologies, which is extremely important to the health of
the Web.
> Did anybody try to understand what I want to do?
> No, only fundamentalist wail arround, that this
> is not standard.
Absolutely, I think everyone here has thought about what you want to do.
But when you post your message saying things like "implement this or I
won't like your browser anymore", it causes people to react defensively,
understandably so. It makes them concentrate on the rude delivery of
your message, rather than the message itself.
Instead, a better approach would be to detail what you're trying to do,
say how MSIE does it, then ask how one would do it using the W3C
standards. Then, if there's no alternative, suggest to the community
that such a feature might be useful, get some feedback, perhaps file an
RFE at bugzilla.mozilla.org. But *never* threaten. It's just common
politeness.
>
> Maybe I should remember, that Mozilla implemented
> already some MSIE extensions, because they found
> out that they are very practicall.
>
This is a true statement. And something I am not pleased to see, but
that's my opinion. It also seems that those adopted features are only
ones for which there is no other method of implementing. So let's work
on finding a feasible way of implementing what you want using the W3C
standards, shall we? Then there's no need to pollute Mozilla with
extraneous "features" like this.
It should be possible for you to specify all your CSS length values
using relative units (em, ex) which would all be based off a root
absolute length. For instance:
body {
font-size:10px;
}
div#positioned {
position:absolute;
left:5em; top:5em; width:20em;
font-size:1.2em;
}
Then, you could do something like:
@media print {
body {
font-size:8px;
}
}
...which would make the base length smaller when printed, giving the
effect of zooming to 80% the original size. This approach gives the
additional benefit of not relying on JavaScript to achieve the effect.
Another possible approach: use the DOM via JavaScript to iterate over
all the elements in the document, and dynamically change the width,
height, top, left, right, bottom, font-size, and line-height (did I
forget any?) to a percentage of the current length of each.
I haven't tested either of these approaches, they're just two possible
ones I pulled off the top of my head. I'm sure digging through the
various recommendations at www.w3.org would turn up other approaches as
well.
> So maybe the truth is not
> "We do it not because it's now in the standard"
> but
> "We do it not, because it just right now to complicate"
>
How about:
"We don't do it, because slapping in non-standard 'features' simply
because they're cool is fundamentally harmful to the universal
accessibility and interoperability of the Web. Instead, we work hard to
create a solid (second to none, by the way) implementation of
industry-sanctioned W3C standards, building a base of technologies upon
which the web developer can use his creativity to build his *own*
'features'."
[Please note that my opinions are in no way the official stance of
Mozilla.org, just me, a consciencious web developer.]
I hope this has been of some help to you. I wish you luck in your
endeavors. Your questions and requests are welcome here, but please try
to keep it professional and non-threatening in the future. Thank you.
--J
--
Jason Johnston
