Slashdot Mirror
Communicator dumps proprietary DOM support
Mistress Nine writes "In order to speed up development time for Netscape 5.0, the Mozilla project is dumping backward compatibility support for some parts of its proprietary DOM, as well as IE4.0's DOM. The staff cited time pressures and compatibility issues as being responsible for them cutting this-however the browser will still be 100% HTML4.0/CSS1/DOM1 compliant, as expected. "
Backwards compatibility should not even be an issue if it means breaking standards. Standards should reign supreme in the minds of developers, that way if it doesn't show up right it is because the viewer doesn't have a good browser and should get a good one.
With a mindset like that for webmasters and browser makers, the web will move toward universally supported standards and universal compatibility much faster.
I guess I'm just one of those people who will tear the whole thing down and build it from the beginning if there is something wrong with it, compatibility be damned. That's what I hate about windows9x - they don't seem to think that way at all.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Hmmm.. Because Netscape develop their browser for a wide range of platforms, There extentions have (mostly) been usable by most of the internet users. Microsoft have put a lot of effort into "extending" HTML seem to have been focussed at locking people into Windows platforms (E.g. Active-X) or furthering their agenda of using HTML as a page-layout-and-universal-document language, which is not what it is for. :o)
Not that netscrape is blameless, of course. But on the whole netscape extensions seem to answer percieved needs of users, where Microsofts extensions seem to scratch the itch of Microsoft, and its desire to make Windows the only web platform. But then again I might just be a delusional bigot...
Correct use of the RFC process is to propose changes for comments before implementing them.. Making changes, implementing it and rolling it out to millions of people and THEN writing an RFC is the wrong way. In this respect I beleive both Netscape and Microsoft are guilty as hell.
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Does anyone out there know what the proper array name for divs in 5.0 is?? For example I can referense and array of images as document.images[]
and in netscape 4 I can referense an div as document.layers[]
but in mozilla document.divs[] or div doesn't seem to work?? is this possible? I can't find it in the specs? it would be VERY helpful..
This is a good thing. In the short term, it will cause some pain for the small percentage of web developers who actually used the proprietary Netscape or MS DOMs.
But in the long term, it goes a long way to forcing developers to code to the standard. This is a good thing. This can be seen as the opposite of what MS is doing, i.e., encouraging developers to break the standards.
NS4 will crash on many DHTML sites. Thus the problem is not backwards compatibility with deprecated DOM extensions (which were rarely used), but backwards compatiblity with (soon to be obselete) NS4 browsers trying to render sites that it can't. Lets all hope that most people move to NS5 as soon as it's out and stable. Given the nightmare of supporting IE3 for all these years, NS4 could provide many more headaches.
Wouldn't be usefull to know which are the instructions that won't be supported in the new version?
For example if mouseover won't be supported anymore, some webmaster would like to know it ASAP... (and hopefully to know what is the replacement for it)
Does anyone know where is possible to find a list?
Marco
Isn't one of the "Open Source" community's touted advantages is that we HAVE no deadlines? No software leaves beta before it's time because there are no artificial arbitrary deadlines.
Now suddenly our most visible and important software is leaving beta without being completely finished for no particular reason.
Of course, I don't code free software (That's my contribution to the free software community: I don't curse them my terrible coding), so my opinion doesn't really matter.
I found it on their ftp site under the "english" directory. ftp://ftp.netscape.org/pub/com municator/english/4.61
-Brent
I hope they do incorporate back in their DOM, as backwards [as well as forwards] compatibility almost relies on the web as its case in point! The fact is, the pre-stylesheet ability to eliminate page borders by stuffing the BODY tag with such properties as MARGINWIDTH="0" and the IE equivalent LEFTMARGIN="0" [or vice-versa, i can't remember] has saved my ass more times than i'd care to count.
Abandoning their previous DOM leaves us pseudo Transistional HTML4.0 developers between a rock and a hard place. Stylesheets aren't well or consistently enough supported to really flex them and often a kludge is your best friend at 3:45am on Monday morning.
But with XML menacing us 'scripters' and promising imminent arrival, from what i understand of it, anyone can take or leave this proprietary DOM when building pages, right?
--
Rare Window - free your photos
The way I see it, Netscape introduced the DOM to web browsers, as a way to allow JavaScript to manipulate the browser and documents within it.
The W3C decided that the DOM should be handled differently, that's what made Netscape's approach proprietary.
Sure Netscape has introduced a number of proprietary things into browsers, like background colors and images, alot of them eventually became standards. Think of how bland looking web pages were before Navigator 1.1. If we had relied upon standards bodies to come up with this stuff, we probably would have to wait a few years longer.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
I think it's perfectly fine that Mozilla has dropped NS4 code. For the smart webdevelopers who've been using an API for their JavaScript applications it will make everything a whole lot nicer for them - all you gotta do is "port" the API to Mozilla and you're done.
Netscape has done more to subvert "web standards" than MS - by far.
/mill - who thinks Netscape should have kudos for deprecating their old proprieraty 'solutions' though
Look at some of my previous postings on dates of Navigator releases vs. CSS equivalents. Netscape as the great innovator and W3C as stale and slow is a myth.
Look at how far Viola had come in 94/95 and compare to where we are today. Saddening, eh?
Even on Linux, I prefer to use KDE or HotJava than Netscape.
It's slow at rendering, and loading.
Has anyone ever seen how badly it's paginating algorythm is? Whenever i resize the browser window, it has to repaginate the entire page. Sometimes it reloads it off the server again! I would never dare to try resizing the window while it's still downloading a page, sometimes it just craps up and never draws the page.
IE on the other hand is multithreaded, but not only that has a decent pagination routine. If I resize the browser window, the page doesn't need to be redrawn, if images will move close or further apart as do DIVs, tables, cells and everything else. It even works while IE is still downloading.
And in navigator, when you click on a link, the entire page is locked!!! So i can't click on another link while the current one is loading.
It's no suprise that implementing DHTML to the extend IE does is a difficult job for Netscape, since they reply on just rerendering the entire page whenever something changes. Lame.
Also, font support on Netscape are all stuffed.
Do you people realise IE supports more web standards than Netscape? So what if it has some *extra* features.
Some of the problems i mentioned like fonts are probably for cross platform compatability. But the pagination problems are unconfigurable.