Re: Exposing the critical ACTUAL style values?

Shelby Moore wrote:

>At 08:08 PM 12/15/2002 -0800, Ray Whitmer wrote:
>  
>
>>I lead the effort to try to produce such a standard for what I believe 
>>you are requesting.  Unfortunately, it did not have the backing of 
>>enough participants besides myself (not any that I can remember towards 
>>the end).
>>    
>>
>
>Ray thanks for your reply.  I just read (11pm CST) in more detail your DOM
>Views and Formatting draft spec, which IS the general concept of what I am
>requesting:
>
>http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Views/views-formatting.html
>
>I wonder if one reason this spec did not garnish more interest is because
>the spec may require a lot of work to implement.  I think there may be a
>much easier way to get the necessary generality.  More on simplication below...
>

This was a very early first draft and would have undoubtedly migrated to 
some form that did not require too much implementation effort on the 
part of browser vendors.  It was my opinion at the time that the model 
advocated would actually be quite trivial to wrap around existing 
implementations, but I was in no way in love with any aspect of the 
draft and would have happily yielded to anyone else wanting to take it 
in another direction or edit the specification.  I would certainly favor 
something simple, abstract, and easy to get implementations of.  I was 
new to Netscape at the time so I cannot say I had a perfect sense of 
Netscape's implementation, although I had the full support of Netscape 
development at the time to spend the time to do it, as they clearly saw 
the value in it.

It might be possible for a third party such as yourself to make the 
necessary wrappers in Mozilla, IE, Konqueror, etc. to demonstrate such a 
thing working, which would then interest me in seeing what is missing 
and how it could be hawked to the interested vendors as a desirable 
standard extension.

Short of a plan on how to get agreement and implementation in major 
browser vendors to adopt it, I do not see myself working on it, just to 
have it become yet another private extension for Mozilla.  IMO, it 
clearly was the interest by enough browser vendors that was lacking at 
the end, not the obvious fact that the design was far from complete or 
proven by anyone.

Ray Whitmer
rayw@netscape.com

Received on Monday, 16 December 2002 12:16:24 UTC