Slashdot Mirror
Gecko under Review
Elizabeth Childs sent us an excellent review of Gecko, along with some notes from the Mozilla Party 2.0. *sigh* Now, that sounds like it would have been fun. The review itself does a good job of talking about why Gecko can be such a big deal for developers. Mmm...standards.
How can you expect to code in C++ without a browser?? The two innovations are so inter-woven, my brain is unable to comprehend attempts to separate the two. Hell, even a kernel, office suite, web browser, and programming languages cannot be separated. Who in their right mind would code in VB without first making their computer boot to a spreadsheet linking things from a database out on the web?? And all of this with a significant amount of personal information attached to each and every file, MAC address, IPs used from the last 6 years, weight, longitude, GPS coordinates. Users want these things, dammit, stop harassing me!!
As you can see, without integration of every component, computers are useless. I still can't figure out how to use the Calculator program that comes with Windowsbecuase it doesn't come up in IE. Users cannot be expected to figure out what all those buttons are supposed to do by themselves (where's that paper clip??).
Want to know what 36*36 is? Fire up the modem, connect to the Internet, download some ActiveX things, watch some Shockwave demos while you're waiting (better have a P3/500 at least too), and sooner or later you'll have the answer. Then two months later we find out there was a bug in the program and must pay $89 for the fixed dll and the actual answer to the original question. Wait, you installed a program by IBM? Well, no answers provided by your computer ever will be able to be trusted. Call up Gateway and get a new one, telling them it must be made of all MS products. That's the way of the future, folks. Embrace.
30 developers is actually a pretty decent amount, if they are making significant contributions. But the biggest reason is that Mozilla still hasn't achieved basically working status. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" mentions that this is a necessary state to attract more developers. Developers often get hooked into making bigger mods to a program by making a simple improvement, which just isn't possible without working code.
Part of the problem is that people have been oversold on the supposed speed of open source development. Open source projects *aren't* generally that fast, they just have the inexorability of a glacier. It's only the quick fixes that open source does quickly. Expecting magic from a large project that has been redesigned from the ground up is a bit too optimistic.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Absolutely agree with you. But did YOU try out that Gecko source? I downloaded it few times, first being in Apr, 1998. It was SUCH A MESS. It is now. I don't mind catching bugs, but in MY software. NGLayout (as it was initially called) is a fairly complicated product, full of bugs. Only the one who designed it have really good chance to debug it. We simply need some solid ground to start with, not horde of bugs!
Indeed, programming for me is a hobby only and I hardly believe most of open source coders do it full-time for free (those who not students), we have to live somehow, right? So, I could and would code FEATURES (which IMO many would like to do), but not bugs. I simply have no time for that.
If Linus rolled out his big stuff full of bugs he would get same responce. He made it right, giving out at least something VERY limited but stable, so people could start their own features and not get drawn in bugs.
IMO, Netscape made a fatal mistake: being desperate in the begging of 1998 they made half-move: releasing useless pile of code, even after year of development, having full time qualified developers from Netscape (!) they didn't make it! At best they will finish it by the end of this year (I hope, NN4 is no fun for me).
I believe this was one of the main reasons why so little developers so far.
Second biggest is that focus has changed: browser was is over. No matter who's won (IE in my opinion though), now it's no longer a hype. It's all about Linux vs Windows. All glory goes now to those who work on Linux, since most OSS guys don't get paid, the amount of glory received is way too important (that was rightfully noted by JWZ in his resignation).
In all, untill I see finished and shipping product (not beta-like-Communicator-4.0) I won't spend a minute coding it. And others seems had similiar thoughts.
p.s. My English is far from being perfect but I am working on it.
AtW,
http://www.investigatio.com
alexc
Join Majestic-12 Distributed Search Engine
What does HTML/CSS lack (from a document point of view) that XML/XSL can do / can do better?
To which I respond, what does CSS give that HTML is missing (considering the number of users you will lose in the process)?
You use style sheets if you have a necessarily complicated presentation model. This would most likely only occur if your data model was also somewhat necessarily complex. In this case you should be definitely using XML. It is the only way to model data and present it simultaneously. CSS gives complex layouts to inherently simple strcutures. This mismatch has already killed CSS.
Given that, I repeat that I would never recommend any of the current style sheet technologies for use right now. User adoption rates are so low, and browser compliance is so random, it is not worth losing users.
Thanks for the kind words. With regards to DSSSL, I have to say that DSSSL is maybe the most complicated standard I have ever read for any technology. Its sort of a moot point seeing that it is basically dead. Its very elegant (uses Scheme as a descriptive language), but like SGML, overkill.
I agree that XSL can also be very messy. I agree that it is hard to understand. Tools will be needed to develop this kind of content. CSS and XSL are too complex to code by hand on a large site. Vanilla HTML 3.2 is still the way to go.
CSS was born, promoted, and bascially died in the nursery without ever being adopted on a popular site.
XSL support is the way to go if you're even considering supporting intelligent style sheet technology.
Of course, I wouldn't use any of the current style sheet technologies on a popular page right now - conformance in browsers is simply way too low to bother. Its going to be a long long time before developers of popular sites are going to be able to get beyond pushing html 3.2. Its simply not worth it to alienate users by implementing a whiz-bang technology.
CSS is actually pretty useful for some things. It's a matter of what you're doing. It's tomorrow's technology, though, not today's. CSS looks pretty decent in mozilla 5 (the snapshots). So CSS is a nice toy right now that would probably be good to play with to get used to it for when it will be a tool. The next version of netscape should have full CSS compatability, and I think that IE is somewhere around 80-90% compliant. Good enough at least for the basic stuff. And that's where javascript comes in. :-)
:-)
Btw, that's part of CSS - looking good and degrading gracefully. Once the browsers are ready, which should happen within the next 6-8 months, putting up little stickkers that say "looks best in NS 5.0 or IE 5.0" would satisfy most holdovers that are getting stuck with a logical design that' probably better than the "whizbang" design anyhow.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
The reason I started off with a controversial thought was this: I was one of the early downloaders, and like you "I don't have the time to read through that much code--other things have to get done. However, we especially need Mozilla to succeed in non-Windows environments because it is by far the highest profile Open Source project other than Linux itself.
What I want people to realize about Mozilla is that the overall code is in much better condition, and we coders have everything to gain by becoming re-enthused about development. I am looking to rejoin the effort once I determine which code branch I can best contribute to.
One final thought: even non-coders can help an OS project develop, by acting as additional "quality control/assurance" testers. As a veteran coder with 20+ years of experience, I've always been happier when someone showed me the bug so I could fix it, rather than having to find every last little problem myself. The beauty of Open Source is that when someone finds a problem, more than one of us (at a time) can work on fixing it.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
First of all, I haven't worked on the Mozilla codebase any. I'm up to my ears in projects (some free, some not) as it is. So take this for what it's worth:
Netscape apparently had code problems long before releasing Mozilla as open source. This is common in software companies where "featuritis" gets combined with "must ship" deadlines on a mature (old?) base product. Harried developers make quick, inelegant patches in places where a complete rewrite would be the Right Thing.
Also, much of the code for Mozilla/Netscape is written to be portable on different systems. Reviewers comparing IE to Netscape seem to forget that Netscape runs on systems Microsoft can't touch. I suspect this keeps Mozilla developers from using a lot of the handy platform-specific libraries (such as MFC) that speed up development. It also can lead to code with a lot of #ifdef statements, which does nothing to make the code more readable.
Finally, as has been pointed out before, the original released source was huge, complicated, and nowhere near complete. It's always more fun to add coolness to a solid program than it is to undo cruftiness. Perhaps a better approach would have been to start from scratch with a very simple well-designed Gecko engine and release that into the open-source wilderness. (Yes, that's 20/20 hindsight from an armchair project manager.)
Personally, I'm really looking forward to the new Netscape and the Gecko engine. Some of these people criticizing the project remind me of PHBs who stand over my shoulder and say, "Is it ready yet? How about now?"
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Flame time. I hereby accuse the vast majority of /. readers who preach about the virtues of Open Source of hypocrisy.
Why?
- According to info published in JWZ's resignation, only about thirty non-Netscape developers have joined the project. From statistics published shortly after the codebase was released, the number of peope who downloaded the code (then did nothing) was a couple orders of magnitude greater.
- Red Hat adds around ten coders to GNOME, and the project accelerates into a 1.X release.
- recently joined another project, which seemed to have a lot going for it -- turns out that we have (including myself)
- five developers, including one fellow working mostly on documentation.
- A few months ago, I offered to start an Open Source wavelet page on my domain. I got just one response. [BTW, I have begun working on the definition and goals for an OpenSource wavelet project. MOTL (more on this later)]
Total? Thirty six coders. According to...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...