Re: Browsers

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

|> ROC> It's a resource issue. Breaking the IE monopoly and dragging the
|> ROC> HTML+CSS Web towards standards-compliance with our limited
|> ROC> resources is hard enough (but we're doing it). Implementing
|> ROC> gargantuan specs like SVG 1.2 is just too much right now.
|>
|> I can understand that, if resources are a finite sum (add resource here
|> takes away resource there). One of the benefits of open source is that
|> this is not true - people interested in feature X implement feature X
|> regardless of whether people interested in feature Y implement feature
|> Y.
|>
|>
| True, but there are limits to this.  First, if you know of someone
| interested in
| "feature X", who has support to work on Mozilla, send them our way.
| I've heard
| that Adobe has lots of implementation experience.  Would they like to
| donate some
| time?  Seriously, while resources are not limited in the same way, they
| are often
| limited in other ways.  I'm a volunteer, for example.  My management is
| aware and
| supportive of my involvement, but at the end of the day, its not "my day
| job".
| Second, and perhaps more critical, there is a significant resource
| limitation in the
| reviewing and superreviewing stages of the development cycle.  There are
| just
| not that many people who have spent enough time with the code base to
be in
| the position to provide r/sr on some of the code that lives down in the
| guts of the
| layout engine, for example.  This is a critical stage in the process,
| and the way
| in which new people (like me) learn the code base without breaking
| things really
| badly in the nightlies or releases.

I ranted on this a bit last month:
http://www.dylanschiemann.com/blog/preventingDeathSVG.html

There was a recent article that Adobe was "coming up with an open source
strategy."  As a "web app" developer, I find Adobe's lack of
communicating their release schedule in any manner very frustrating as
their svg implementation is the best on the market, but has a very
uncertain future.  I am very excited about the progress mozilla has made
thus far.

The issues scooter has brought up are sadly even more endemic to other
W3C working groups, and other standards organizations.  In my experience
as a lurker here, this working group has been more open and receptive to
tackling the hard problems, as opposed to others which declare
everything out of scope.  But the comparison I make isn't so much a
compliment to this group as the competition isn't strong, but it does
mean that I hold out hope for the progress of this group towards an SVG
spec and modules that will be implemented in modern user agents.

- -Dylan
- --
Dylan Schiemann
http://www.dylanschiemann.com/
http://www.sitepen.com/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFBkor78nLgh/JJsxERApzqAKCCjLdhjDwkcJFFLD7y5UvF0s8Q6QCfePNz
zjDolMp2f59lL2X77Edt1B8=
=BwWm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Received on Wednesday, 10 November 2004 21:41:55 UTC