RE: Introducing NetscapeML

>Derek Harding <derek@tpdinc.com> wrote:
>>If you look closely at IE 3.0 you'll find plenty of prioprietary extensions
>>(ActiveX, NT challenge/response authentication, VB Script, HTML extensions
>>etc.), and if you look at Netscape you see other proprietary stuff. The only
>>difference is that IE also supports CSS. 

Except in IE, you'll notice that the "proprietary" bits are embedded via
standardized interoperable interfaces - sure, ActiveX could be
considered "proprietary" (then again, OLE's widespread use for the past
few years has made it near-ubiquitous on Windows - compared to zip for
NS plug-ins), but it is embedded via the <OBJECT> tag - on which we have
worked heavily with the W3C (and Netscape) to standardize.  We didn't go
invent a tag that can't even be expressed in SGML like the <EMBED> tag. 
VBScript is the same story - we used an embedding mechanism that is in
common with JavaScript (which we also support).  I don't think anyone
here has a problem with JavaScript, or PERL, or any other scripting
language someone might care to put inside the SCRIPT tag.  Again, since
VB has been out for a number of years, and has hundreds of thousands if
not millions of developers, I'd say it's also fairly ubiquitous.  Since
we do own it, I wouldn't recommend it as part of HTML - but I think
embedding it is an awesome idea.

In respect to the HTML extensions, I personally wish we could take back
the MARQUEE tag and represent the same capability in CSS.  I feel
BGSOUND is still an important function.  In IE 3.0, however, I feel that
you'll find we've done very minimal enhancements to HTML (e.g.,
background images on table cells) and a LOT of work on realizing the
potential of some already-drafted ideas (e.g., CSS and the "new" TABLE
model).

>

Received on Monday, 1 July 1996 14:36:31 UTC