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Who says Netscape's *lost*?

From:  "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com>
To:  charles.cooper@cnet.com
Subject:  Who says Netscape's *lost*?
Date:  Fri, 14 Mar 2003 14:41:02 -0500
Cc:  letters@lwn.net

You assume the browser war is over.
 
Your recent news.com.com piece <http://news.com.com/2010-1071-992568.html>
makes that clear.
 
I think your argument is based on a flawed premise, myself.
 
AOL is shipping the Gecko browser core as part of AOL8, which you may
not have noticed, since you didn't mention it in your piece. I'll
*assume* you didn't know it, since it would be horribly disingenuous
for you to fail to mention such a pertinent item in a column like that.
:-)
 
In any event, between that release -- which is likely to garner at
*least* 5 million desktops out of AOL's something like 30M, and Apple's
adoption of the KDE Konqueror core for it's new Safari browser -- a not
inconsequential number of seats...
 
and given that Moz is 100% standards compliant, and Konq is pretty
close, I don't by any means think that IE has "won" the browser war --
since *it* is *not*.
 
Piss off millions of AOLians and Macheads? Nope; businesses won't stay
*there* for long.
 
And the whole landscape will change again.
 
And it will be due, in large part, to Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds
and Eric Raymond -- none of whom were getting paid for it.
 
A parallel irony, somehow, to the commercial explosion of the Internet,
a project spearheaded by a bunch of largely gay, longhair college
students. :-)
 
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
 
   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
     -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")


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Who says Netscape's *lost*?

Posted Mar 20, 2003 9:28 UTC (Thu) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]

[...] Moz is 100% standards compliant

Unfortunately, it's not - see this bug about css-generated content, for example. It's been open since 1999, for more than four years, and there seem to be no plans to fix it anytime soon, either, despite the fact that it is extremely annoying.

Who says Netscape's *lost*?

Posted Mar 20, 2003 20:06 UTC (Thu) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link]

I'm sorry but after reading the bugzilla thread and checking the standard I have to say that this bug is for an obscure feature that is likely to be infrequently encountered in a disruptive way.

But then again, what the hell do I know...

standards compliance

Posted Mar 21, 2003 3:40 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

That's highly hypocritical, if I understand your point. You don't refute the claim that Mozilla is failing to comply with a standard here, so I'll assume it's true. Instead, you say it doesn't matter because this particular requirement of the standard isn't needed by most people.

If you get to pick and choose the standards with which you will comply, based on particular user requirements, then you don't believe in the concept of standards compliance at all, and Mozilla is no better than I.E.

I have been bitter about the death of standards ever since my ISP many years ago installed a NNTP ("news") server that failed to implement one of the commands defined in the NNTP standard. My unique news reader needed that command. The ISP's position was that the vast majority of users use news readers that don't use that command, so it didn't make sense to implement it. Hard to argue with.

Who says Netscape's *lost*?

Posted Mar 21, 2003 3:44 UTC (Fri) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

Regardless of its rarity, any bug means not 100% compliance.

But anyway, CSS2 content generation is important, and it's especially important for list elements, where you need to number things. TeX has done this right for decades and if XML ever wants to succeed in structured text (the area it was actually designed for, despite its current uses having nothing to do with that...), it needs support for this.

Who says Netscape's *lost*?

Posted Mar 21, 2003 3:52 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

I'll put this comment here, since it applies equally to both replies to this gent's post.

Ok.

I retract 100% (though I didn't say "100.0%", which I normally would in that context.

But you know what? For the purposes of this particular conversation, 99 and 44/100% is probably good enough. You're correct that this isn't exactly a *trivial* thing to have broken...

but at least those people who *do* really "need" this to work correctly can *get to it to fix it*... and that takes much of the sting out of it's brokenness, for me, at least.

No reply from the author...

Browser "wars" *ARE* over, in fact

Posted Mar 20, 2003 16:55 UTC (Thu) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]

What was really called "browser wars" really has passed. Browser wars *are* over. Browser wars were about the browser distributors inventing lots of new, coll proprietary things to be cooler and better than the other browsers and gaining market share due to this. And it was about "simple" browsers. Applications just for accessing the web vie displaying HTML.

We now have something completely different. Invention of proprietary features in displaying HTML pages isn't that interesting any more, in fact, even IE gets more compliant to standards with every release (though it's quite slow in that area). What's more interested today is to create platforms for web applications or more general internet applications. I wouldn't still call it "browser wars", it's more an internet application (r)evolution going on here.

Mozilla and Konqueror are moving towards being platforms for dealing with multiple kinds of internet services access, Mozilla even provides a whole cross-platform application building framework. Of course, some simple browsers still get build based on those architectures (like Safari, Camino, Galeon, K-Meleon, Phoenix, etc.), and some simple browsers exist beneath that (IE, Opera, etc.) - but even M$ works more in the area of internet services and applications today (see .NET, see Media Player's features, and so on).

It's no simple "browser war" going on here, it getting a completely different movement, leaving browsers as just some small part of a big communications world.

Mozilla standards compliant?

Posted Mar 21, 2003 3:43 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

With what standards is Mozilla 100% compliant? Internet RFC's? W3C standards?

The standard that matters is the de facto Internet Explorer standard. That's what web sites implement, and Internet Explorer is 100% compliant with that.

Mozilla standards compliant?

Posted Mar 21, 2003 15:48 UTC (Fri) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link]

That depends. Which IE standard? IE5 for the Mac? IE5? IE5.5? IE6? All four have a substantial user base, and all four implement things differently. On the RFCs side, it doesn't depend what IE implements so much as what Apache implements. That's the "de facto standard" for HTTP.

Anyway, to consider IE as being a "de facto standard" is poor thought anyway. Even on a single-platform system there's a real need for a standard - Even within MS's own products, they have to make sure HTML appears the same between Office and IE. If someone's a web designer, they probably have to deal with Dreamweaver, which is yet another rendering engine. Things like Flash and Java need to be able to deal with HTML/XML. Throw in the Mac (OS8, 9, and 10!), and the variety of free browsers, as well as Opera on all platforms, and you have a case where it's definitely in everyone's best interest to follow the standards.

Mozilla standards compliant?

Posted Mar 21, 2003 19:02 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

No, that is not the only standard that matters, and that mindset is precisely the thing I'm not pleased with.

The World Is Not Microsoft, folks.

It's not, and that will become clearer and clearer in the next 3 years.

That is why we have independent standards.

32 million AOL users will start migrating to the Gecko core of Netscape, starting almost immediately. You really think that website builders will ignore them?

There are maybe 10 million people using Macs. They're gonna migrate to Safari, slowly. Yes, they're only 8% of the desktops... but that's the TV ratings fallacy. They're still *10 MILLION PEOPLE*. You gonna ignore them?

I don't think so.

The only reliable way to cope is to demand that the pages and the browsers both comply to some set of independent standards.

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