Re: CSS Browsers

Thus spake Xavier Plantefeve:
 
>   I wanted to know if one here has try the future NetScape 5?

Sort of. Macintosh builds just began appearing. They are rather primitive.

> Is there any improvements in CSS handling?

The CSS1 support is pretty good already, and I am hopeful that it will be
virtually perfect before it ships.

Netscape has made a clean break with the past, with the Mozilla project
rewriting all of the parsing/rendering code. Not everybody realizes this
yet - it's truly a new beginning. If there are 4.x bugs that make it into
5.0, it will be a coincidence, not an oversight.

> I was more than disapointed
> to discover that IE5b has (seemingly) only a very few enhancements
> on that point (in fact, the browser engine seems to be (not exactly
> but nearly) the same).

IE5b2 shows a few modest improvements in the CSS1 area, as well as some
MS-proprietary extensions. The Web Standards Project covered some of MSIE's
4-5b CSS development path in its review at http://www.webstandards.org/ie/ .

It appears to me that MSIE5's planners believed that Netscape would be dead
or dying by now, so it wouldn't be necessary to wave the
standards-conformance flag anymore. After all, MS had won the beauty
pageant with its partial CSS1 implementation in IE4, yet Web developers
appeared unwilling to abandon an HTML-based presentation paradigm. Since
Netscape appeared totally unable or unwilling to compete in the CSS area
with any of the ten 4.x.x releases to date, I think they thought it would
be safe to leave CSS1 in its "demo" state and concentrate instead on
nonstandard extensions like "behaviors", proto-XSL, HTML+Time, and VML.

Now that Netscape, late in IE5's development cycle, is suddenly threatening
to release a reference-class UA for CSS1 and DOM level 1 with its new
"Gecko" engine, and even little guys like Opera are stepping up to the CSS1
plate, I hope the MS folks are adjusting course.
--
Todd Fahrner                    The printed page transcends space and time.
mailto:fahrner@pobox.com        The printed page, the infinitude of books,
http://www.verso.com/agitprop/  must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.
                                                   - El Lissitzky, 1923

Received on Friday, 18 December 1998 04:00:10 UTC