Re: Clarification needed on ALT/TITLE tooltips

On Thursday 2003-06-26 11:52 -0700, Tantek Çelik wrote:
> On 6/26/03 6:57 AM, "Brian Bober" <netdemonz@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I'm not trying to brag, but Microsoft could learn a bit from Mozilla having

(Nor would you be in a position to brag.  Nor would I, since the
cross-platform development model was well established long before I
became involved in writing code for Mozilla.)

> > the same codebase on every platform.
> 
> It's not as black and white as you put it.  Having a separate codebase
> allowed Tasman to develop at much faster speed (than either IE/Windows or
> Mozilla), and thus IE5/Mac shipped in March of 2000, with standards support
> far ahead of any other browser (including Mozilla, whose NS6 release weeks
> later merely proved my point, since reviews universally panned NS6 in
> comparison to IE5/Mac), which was also confirmed in numerous reviews.

Just because NS6 had serious problems doesn't mean that its
cross-platform development model was bad.  (Cross-platform user
interface and concurrent cross-platform development of core code are two
totally different things.)  However, the model being good for Netscape
and Mozilla wouldn't imply its suitability for others.

Furthermore, claiming that IE5/Mac's standards support was ahead of
Mozilla's at the time is a difficult claim to defend, and is also
unrelated to NS6 having problems in other areas.  (I'm certainly not
convinced.)  IE5/Mac may have done better on the CSS1 test suite, but
Mozilla did better on many other tests.  See, for example, my archived
CSS test results from May of 2000 [1].  Which is better depends on how
support of different things is weighed.

> Also, IE6/Windows benefited from many of the innovations that Tasman was
> able to make since it was a separate code base that could attempt solving
> problems that were deemed risky or even impossible (e.g. fixing the box
> model, DOCTYPE switching etc.), solutions that were also copied by Mozilla
> (and other browsers) for that matter.

Claiming that they were copied by Mozilla is a little difficult since
 * Mozilla was planning DOCTYPE switching from at least November 1998 [2]
   and it was shipped in Mozilla M11 in November 1999.
 * Mozilla supported the correct box model since before Mozilla M3 in
   March 1999 (the oldest release still available).  My memory (which
   may be incorrect) was that it supported the box model correctly when
   I first tested in it August/September 1998.

(This is off-topic, but I have trouble leaving these statements
unanswered.  However, I think Tantek was right to respond since I think
the criticism of Microsoft in the previous messages was inappropriate
for this list.)

-David

[1] http://dbaron.org/css/test/results_20000505
[2] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1312

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >

Received on Thursday, 26 June 2003 17:41:40 UTC