Re: Proposal for non-normative example section (Was: RE: How is it possible to devise such a feeble system?)

Vadim Plessky wrote:
> 

> I hope that Konqueror will pick up soon, and overgrow Mozilla/NS in visible
> future. Than things will be easy. Konqueror emulates MS IE's "quirk" mode
> pretty well (but implementing this consumed a lot of resources), for
> standards-compliant (Strict) mode you don't have such development overhead.
> You just need to implement standard. So I would say in such scenario we will
> get standards-compliant web space just in case only Microsoft (but not
> Netscape) implemented CSS3.  KHTML will be there as well, so both leading
> browsers will fully support CSS3 (core).


I must admit I'm missing your logic here somehow. If the two leading
browsers were Konqueror and MSIE and both implment IE's quirks mode (I
assume you refer not just to those places where they differ from the CSS
spec but also their DOM features like document.all) isn't there a
tremendous risk that everyone will simply author to MSIE's quirks mode
and ignore standards? That's pretty much what we've seen with the 2
quirks modes of Netscape 4 and MSIE in the last 2 or 3 years. In that
scenario, about the only thing that would prevent that from happening,
would be for Microsoft to sacrifice backwards compatitibility with their
own quirks mode and "force" people to standards. This makes no business
sense, indeed the practical side of me sees it as irresponsible, much as
the romantic side of me might like it.

This also ignores the fact that Konqueror doesn't run on even as many
platforms as MSIE let alone the 30 or so Mozilla supports. (yes, I know
support is not equal across all platforms). Perhaps I'm wrong - with the
port of the Qt toolkit to Mac OS, perhaps Konqueror can at least match
Mozilla's three core platforms, but its going up against some very
strong niche competitors in the Windows and Mac worlds (Omniweb, Opera,
iCab) even disregarding the heavyweights Mozilla and IE.


> Now question is how fast Microsoft can implement CSS3, in case standard is
> "fixed". We can only guess here :-)
> There is an opinion (from some Konqueror developers)  that some parts of CSS2
> are very difficult to implement, and implementing those parts just doesn't
> worth efforts.
> Compact, clear, non-misleading CSS3 specification will allow KDE developers
> to skip CSS2, so we will get standard-compliant web space *faster*.
> As I said, CSS3's modular concept is Good. We just  need to define good set
> of modules, and fix all bugs in those modules ASAP.
> And get commitment from Netscape and Microsoft to implement those modules.
> But it's already another story ...


I'm curious as to why you appear to think its more likely Konqueror will
implement CSS3 than Mozilla. Note I say "mozilla" rather than
"netscape". Its hardly as if Mozilla's future plans are any secret. Now,
you might be arguing Konqueror will make quicker progress than Mozilla
towards full support for CSS-2 or 3, which may be true, but I think you
will have to look long and hard to find an organization who has commited
to try to deliver standards support than Mozilla. If you believe they'll
fail, that's one thing, if you don't believe they will try, I'm curious
as to why you might think that.

-- 
AndyT (lordpixel)

Received on Thursday, 25 October 2001 09:57:10 UTC