Browsers

Chris Lilley wrote:

>perhaps because the focus has moved away from W3C standards and
>more towards replicating a Win/IE clone experience on other platforms.
>
I feel that this comment, and similar comments by Peter, are extremely 
unfair. We at Mozilla have made massive sacrifices by constantly 
choosing standards compliance over IE compatibility*. We have a huge 
evangelism campaign to get Web sites to become standards compliant. We 
do have a "quirks mode" with more IE compatibility, but if we didn't, 
we'd have no market share and therefore no leverage to drag sites 
towards standards compliance. But we do and we are winning, which means 
the W3C is winning.

* Of which Ian Hickson has been a key proponent, by the way.

>multiple codepaths; having a MathML implementation and an SVG
>implementation, for example.
>
Are you saying that we should be able to implement MathML and SVG with 
the same code path? What does this mean?

>On the desktop, because the legacy HTML browsers were not interested in
>adding the newer XML based specifications - SMIL, MathML, SVG  - into
>their fragile rendering layers.
>
We've had MathML for about four years. Hardly anyone uses it, but we tried.

>The decision to not do any SVG 1.2 in Mozilla is also disappointing,
>since Mozilla will not be able to help SVG 1.2 get through CR. Although,
>its not clear if that is a decision of the Mozilla foundation or just
>the policy of a couple of people' I hope that latter and that wiser
>voices will prevail.
>
It's a resource issue. Breaking the IE monopoly and dragging the 
HTML+CSS Web towards standards-compliance with our limited resources is 
hard enough (but we're doing it). Implementing gargantuan specs like SVG 
1.2 is just too much right now. The mobile vendors that you mentioned 
have only implemented SVG Tiny for the most part, if I understand 
correctly, and they don't even have to deal with the DOM/CSS/HTML 
integration issues.

I hope we can turn on some SVG support in default builds soon, but if we 
enable an SVG subset that doesn't correspond to a proper profile or is 
so broken that it poisons SVG for the Web, then you'd be the first to 
demand our heads and rightly so. So we have to get that right while also 
making sure we cover the features that Web authors want.

Rob

-- 
Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. ... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We
have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the
Father, full of grace and truth." 1 John 1:1,14

Received on Wednesday, 10 November 2004 14:45:31 UTC