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. "

Comments

Re:a good idea

[Bigman]

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.
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... :o)

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.

This is a good thing

[AT]

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.