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Communicator dumps proprietary DOM support 84

Posted by Hemos from the cut-out-thecrap dept.
Mistress Nine writes "In order to speed up development time for Netscape 5.0, the Mozilla project is dumping backward compatibility support for some parts of its proprietary DOM, as well as IE4.0's DOM. The staff cited time pressures and compatibility issues as being responsible for them cutting this-however the browser will still be 100% HTML4.0/CSS1/DOM1 compliant, as expected. "
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Communicator dumps proprietary DOM support

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  • Internet Explorer does this as well. Here is what I think the problem is. You click a link that takes you to an anchored spot on the same page. You scroll around a little bit and find another, more interesting link to another page. When you click the back button, the last link you went to is still the anchor, despite you having scrolled around a little bit. It's annoying, but I think it's to be expected when a site, such as many news sites, relies heavily on anchors.

    Thats just my opinion, I could be wrong.
    Adam
  • Backwards compatibility should not even be an issue if it means breaking standards. Standards should reign supreme in the minds of developers, that way if it doesn't show up right it is because the viewer doesn't have a good browser and should get a good one.

    With a mindset like that for webmasters and browser makers, the web will move toward universally supported standards and universal compatibility much faster.

    I guess I'm just one of those people who will tear the whole thing down and build it from the beginning if there is something wrong with it, compatibility be damned. That's what I hate about windows9x - they don't seem to think that way at all.
  • Don't forget the abominable
    is another one, but that filled a void at the time.
  • A user agent Pei Wei (I think it was he) of XCF and O'Reilly wrote. Applets, tables, images, and etc. IMHO, we should've had full CSS2 (or equivalent) as the bottom line by now if proprieraty wasn't the way the big two went.

    http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/www/clients/viola

    Look at the screenshots - from 1994.

    /mill
  • Heh, I read an old mail (to one of the lists at
    W3C, can't remember which one) where Thomas Reardon (Microsoft official) rips into Netscape for their double talk.

    In short Netscape agreed, as Microsoft, at a meeting to implement CSS support (positioning etc) and not create their own proprieraty extensions. Some time later Netscape release 'support' for their new tags that allowed for making columns and other things covered by CSS (the names escape me).

    Netscape's response was to claim customer needs etc. Just like MS is pointing to customer needs when dumping MSIE to kill Netscape or whenever they embrace and extends standards.

    /mill - who hasn't even started to rant about accessibility

  • Re:a good idea (Score:4)

    by Bigman ( 12384 ) on Tuesday June 15, 1999 @07:45AM (#1850742) Homepage Journal
    Hmmm.. Because Netscape develop their browser for a wide range of platforms, There extentions have (mostly) been usable by most of the internet users. Microsoft have put a lot of effort into "extending" HTML seem to have been focussed at locking people into Windows platforms (E.g. Active-X) or furthering their agenda of using HTML as a page-layout-and-universal-document language, which is not what it is for.
    Not that netscrape is blameless, of course. But on the whole netscape extensions seem to answer percieved needs of users, where Microsofts extensions seem to scratch the itch of Microsoft, and its desire to make Windows the only web platform. But then again I might just be a delusional bigot... :o)

    Correct use of the RFC process is to propose changes for comments before implementing them.. Making changes, implementing it and rolling it out to millions of people and THEN writing an RFC is the wrong way. In this respect I beleive both Netscape and Microsoft are guilty as hell.

  • > Or does it depend on who does the 'extending' ?

    No, it depends on the type of extension. If the extension is "here's another, nonstandard way to do X, which happens to work better in Windows," that's bad. If the extension is "we didn't implement the whole spec, but here's a nonstandard way to do what we left out," that's bad. If the extension is "here's how to do something completely new, which doesn't conflict with any existing standards," that's ok.

  • The problem is, Microsoft does extensions to things, and DOESNT release an RFC. They keep the details of how the extenstions work a secret, so no one else can make something that implements the same extensions. Then they release toolkits that (transparently to the end user) produce code/documents/etc that rely on those extensions, and then force them to use only Microsoft products becuase only MS stuff is 'compatible'
  • Sure, OSS doesn't need deadlines. It can however lead to feature creep. Hence the need to ship a "production" version on a fairly regular basis, similar to how Linus releases a major version of Linux every 18 months.

  • What (is/was) Viola?
  • Sure, mozilla should be nice when it comes out. But it isn't out. It's unreleased, unsupported, undistributed, and UNTIL IT IS, Internet Explorer holds the crown. And don't talk to me about the milestone releases; there's no way one of those could pass itself off as release-quality software.
  • A myth I say. Netscape as the innovator and W3C as stale and slow is a myth.

    Netscape chose not to implement stylesheets because they thought the proprieraty way would give them an advantage. Indeed it did early on, but a better design caught up on them (just like MS have problems with Win*).

    I refer to my previous posts on the time table of CSS vs. Netscape Navigator.

    /mill
  • [Newcomer & first time poster - Be gentle :)]

    As someone who stayed up all night last night making some DHTML pages IE and NS compatible, my initial response was one of great joy.

    I, too, think there will be problems in the beginning, but as somone else said, the hackers who thought ahead will have a relatively easier time making their code comply.

    On a related note, I've been thinking recently about just how bug-ridden the latest version of Communicator is. I could understand the argument, "Must churn out a new release to prevent getting overwhelmed by Darth Gates."

    I've noticed that more commercial software companies are doing this now; releasing new versions sooner at the expense of quality and basic credibility. The scary thing is that I'm beginning to see that sort of indifference in the younger developers coming out of college.

    Is mainstream software fostering a culture where the craftsmen (or craftswomen), are no longer taking pride in the code they write? Or do I just have a very limited view of reality?

    Aijaz.
  • And we still have a ways to go in order to catch up. :( I wonder if anybody involved with Mozilla will try and bring in some of the Viola code so we can catch up with history?

    And since we are on the topic of history and hypertext systems, have you seen this stuff on Englebart? http://unrev.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]

    There's a streaming video of his original 1968 demo, but it seems to require [yuk]Windows Media Player[/yuk].

    -matt
  • The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [w3c.org] has specifications for HTML [w3c.org], CSS [w3c.org], DOM [w3c.org], and so on and so forth on their web site.
  • Viola doesn't offer anything that can help Mozilla. My point is only that we have barely gotten anywhere since late 1993. It is supposed to be a revolution, but it seems like most of the rebels got drunk and fought about who should be the leader after the revolution.

    Since I haven't been able to get Mozilla to work on my measly P100 at home my first real look at it was yesterday when installing it here at work (PPro/NT) and I must say I am impressed.

    Mozilla is damn fast and my guess they will have a product at the end of the year. I think it will surpass MSIE in support for XML and CSS too. Partly because they were forced to rewrite it from scratch.

    Again. I am truly impressed. Solid implementation of standards.

    If something similar could develop to benefit people with disabilities.. and if "web designers" could get their heads out of the lets-design-it-for-print world..

    /mill
  • Example of bugfix in 4.61 :

    /* free(p); -- Fixes a coredump */

    That shit leaks memory like crazy... :((

  • At that time, the true web standards were immature, and couldn't make pages look like their creators wanted. HTML was a very simple markup tool.
    That was the aim of the HTML, yes. I won't call all the additions that came after "maturation", but "bastardization". Wysiwyg HMTL is a bad joke. Pages didn't look like their creators wanted. Pages don't look like their creators wanted. Pages won't look like their creators wanted. The idea is a big flaw as long as we don't all have the same browser in the same resolution, etc.

    That is why HTML as a simple markup language is neat : That's the Right Thing(Tm) to do.

    Regardless of whether or not you think this was a bad thing, it's what led to the web as it is: early web browsers like Netscape, and, later, Internet Explorer, extended HTML and related standards to make it do what they wanted.
    Somewhere along those lines, though, the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) got on its feet and started creating new markup languages (such as CSS and XML) and adding abilities to other languages (HTML 4.0).

    The "look" has been the problem of the browser alone from the very start, and I remember having seen the concept of "style sheets" on the w3c site for years... It was not formalized yet, but it could have been way faster if software companies showed more interest that they did.

    Instead, they choosed not to implement the "clean solution" at that time, and it is a shame.

  • The article also mentions the release of communicator 4.61 - or is this old news ?
  • Think about it, its a good start->
    at least we can see some sort of 'light'
    (of Netscape 5.0)
  • Does anyone out there know what the proper array name for divs in 5.0 is?? For example I can referense and array of images as document.images[]
    and in netscape 4 I can referense an div as document.layers[]
    but in mozilla document.divs[] or div doesn't seem to work?? is this possible? I can't find it in the specs? it would be VERY helpful..

  • This is a good thing (Score:5)

    by AT ( 21754 ) on Tuesday June 15, 1999 @03:47AM (#1850764)
    This is a good thing. In the short term, it will cause some pain for the small percentage of web developers who actually used the proprietary Netscape or MS DOMs.

    But in the long term, it goes a long way to forcing developers to code to the standard. This is a good thing. This can be seen as the opposite of what MS is doing, i.e., encouraging developers to break the standards.
  • NS4 will crash on many DHTML sites. Thus the problem is not backwards compatibility with deprecated DOM extensions (which were rarely used), but backwards compatiblity with (soon to be obselete) NS4 browsers trying to render sites that it can't. Lets all hope that most people move to NS5 as soon as it's out and stable. Given the nightmare of supporting IE3 for all these years, NS4 could provide many more headaches.
  • Sorry if I ruffled your feathers - I merely intended to point out that the article referenced the release of 4.61 , and as I don't follow the progress of Netscape's bugfix releases that closely , added the old news disclaimer as an apologia to all those who already knew about it.

    Your comment about 4.06 simply confused me =)

  • It would do a lot more towards "..forcing developers to code to the standard .." if it was annnounced as part of a shipping product.

    This probably has more to do with why they were forced into dropping backwards compatability - more of a case of trying to get to market with a complete standard before it all gets
    a) so fragmented its virtually abandoned
    b) so extended that its completely under proprietry control

    Good luck with shipping guys !

  • Wouldn't be usefull to know which are the instructions that won't be supported in the new version?

    For example if mouseover won't be supported anymore, some webmaster would like to know it ASAP... (and hopefully to know what is the replacement for it)

    Does anyone know where is possible to find a list?

    Marco
  • The article said 4.61 and so did I. What are you on about ?
  • The staff cited time pressures

    Isn't one of the "Open Source" community's touted advantages is that we HAVE no deadlines? No software leaves beta before it's time because there are no artificial arbitrary deadlines.

    Now suddenly our most visible and important software is leaving beta without being completely finished for no particular reason.

    Of course, I don't code free software (That's my contribution to the free software community: I don't curse them my terrible coding), so my opinion doesn't really matter.

  • Only found 4.6 both ftp.netscape.com, and one of its mirror site, anyone found it?

    I found it on their ftp site under the "english" directory. ftp://ftp.netscape.org/pub/com municator/english/4.61 [netscape.org]

    -Brent

  • I'm not sure I completely believe the reason. Maybe its just an excuse so that they don't have to do something stupid. Like coding the IE 4.0 DOM for one. I don't think its because of time. Time shouldn't be such a bother in the case of mozilla. So I don't really think you can say they are going to release it unfinished. It will be very well finished, and it will luckily lack the bad DOM's that are a waste of time. Perhaps its a so-called 'market-leverage' act. Who knows, but if it is, its for a good reason.
  • This is not exactly correct -- open source projects have deadlines, just not EXTERNAL deadlines. The developers have laid out their roadmap (which you can see on mozilla.org) and have set certain goals for themselves.

    As to whether ditching proprietary DOM is a good move, I'm all in favor of it -- sites that are "optimized for Blah Woof Browser" need to be fixed, and sites that use some existing "toolkit" for doing DHTML etc. will be fixed when the toolkit becomes compatible with the published standard (the best one I'm aware of is the one at www.dansteinman.com). After all, you are going to have broken compatibility with SOME browsers somewhere; may as well break it in a good cause.
  • the problem is not backwards compatibility with deprecated DOM extensions (which were rarely used), but backwards compatiblity with (soon to be obselete) NS4 browsers trying to render sites that it can't.

    Caveat: I haven't yet checked to see whether the following suggestions have already been implemented...

    All support for all nonstandard extensions should be hived off into their own DLL/Module. Any use of such extensions should cause a warning (suppressable by the user, in the same manner as a security warning).

    For marketing and pragmatic reasons it is important to support some nonstandard extensions. It is equally important to support them in a way that clearly marks them as deprecated. Purists can simply turn off support for all nonstandard extensions and deal with them by emailing the webmasters of sites using such extensions. Purists can even delete the relevant DLL/module.
  • I can only agree. I generally use the KDE browser unless it becomes really unreadable. I hope the KDE guys improve on their product for KDE 2.0.

    As far as I am concerned, Netscape/Mozilla is dead. By the time they release 5.0 we'll have IE 7.0 and 50 million new web standards.

    Perhaps this Opera for Linux turns out to be nice. I'd even pay money for anything but Netscape.

  • The lack of an Expires: tag in the HTTP response can do that. Take Slashdot for instance, every time I hit forward/back while logged on reloads the entire page. I've sent Rob my thoughts on it, but the messages probably got smothered by the thousands of "You suck" letters he gets. :)

    Or it could have to deal with the banner ads being run through a CGI (to capture your IP and all). Since they don't have a real filename, perhaps Netscape isn't able to check anything in its cache and so re-downloads it.
  • I'm complaining about a current product. I don't care if it's soon to be obselete. That's irrelevant. I'm complaning about NS4, the product - didn't say anything about mozilla or IE6, it wasn't part of what I was saying.

    I think mozilla will be a good thing, but like 99.9% of the open source world I'm not contributing at the moment although I wouldn't not contribute given time and a good reason.

    And IE does support more standards than NS4 at the moment. It's more complete DHTML support, CCS support etc. Sure some of those models may have proprietry additions, but there is definitely more support.
    Microsoft did submit their DOM to standards guys to view over.
  • HotJava is rather nice in Linux (using blackdown 1.7 atm).
    It's actually faster than in windows when using the sun jdk.

    IE does back and forward nicely ;)
    It think it must cache the last few pages in memory of something, but it's basically instant going back and forward.
  • Netscape originally started out as the Internet company. Its job was to make the internet usable and bearable, for both developers and users. Netscape Navigator, aka Mozilla, did this - but not in a way that could easily be exploited by many other developers of web browsers.

    At that time, the true web standards were immature, and couldn't make pages look like their creators wanted. HTML was a very simple markup tool. As someone else stated earlier, HTML was incapable of even specifying background images and colours; indeed, earlier versions of Photoshop reccomended using the grey colour of the Netscape default background to create "transparent" images.

    So, faced with making a relatively blas'e, run-of-the-mill web browser like Mosaic, or creating something that really would Change The World, Mosaic Communications, aka Netscape, chose to extend web standards to fit the model they needed.

    Regardless of whether or not you think this was a bad thing, it's what led to the web as it is: early web browsers like Netscape, and, later, Internet Explorer, extended HTML and related standards to make it do what they wanted.

    Somewhere along those lines, though, the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) got on its feet and started creating new markup languages (such as CSS and XML) and adding abilities to other languages (HTML 4.0). For some reason, though, the major browser makers weren't implementing these new standards fully; instead, they implemented bits and pieces, or in some cases nothing at all.

    To this day, there is no browser which is 100% CSS 1 compliant. Opera comes close, but it's not there. Mozilla aims to be the first. Along with implementing XML and HTML 4.0 fully, Mozilla aims to knell the death toll for proprietary "standards" such as Netscape's layers and most anything else not in the specs as brought down by the w3c or EMCA (ie: EMCAScript, aka JavaScript). Netscape no longer has anything to gain from extending standards: they realised that when they released a browser, Netscape 4.x, with very sub-par implementations of existing standards. Why create a new spec if a perfectly good, standard, one exists? It doesn't make sense.

    This isn't the first thing Mozilla will do to destroy proprietary "standards," and it won't be the last. I'm looking forward to seeing what it brings up next.

  • Of course the Mozilla people are writing open source code for a company. And companies are constantly in a race with other companies for a money grab.

    I don't understand their business model. But they must make money from it some how. It seems to me that this open source model works nicely because there is a trade of getting coders from the "open source" community and for an open source style license. It still costs them money for the time the Mozilla staff spends supporting and training coders outside the company.

    They aren't altruistic. Open Source get's something, Netscape/AOL get's something.
  • As the browser wars [wammo.com] rage on, Netscape dump support for their Proprietary DOM and a few million web developers stare, perplexed, at their "best viewed in Netscape" badges -- now rendered redundant.

    I hope they do incorporate back in their DOM, as backwards [as well as forwards] compatibility almost relies on the web as its case in point! The fact is, the pre-stylesheet ability to eliminate page borders by stuffing the BODY tag with such properties as MARGINWIDTH="0" and the IE equivalent LEFTMARGIN="0" [or vice-versa, i can't remember] has saved my ass more times than i'd care to count.

    Abandoning their previous DOM leaves us pseudo Transistional HTML4.0 developers between a rock and a hard place. Stylesheets aren't well or consistently enough supported to really flex them and often a kludge is your best friend at 3:45am on Monday morning.

    But with XML menacing us 'scripters' and promising imminent arrival, from what i understand of it, anyone can take or leave this proprietary DOM when building pages, right?

  • Maybe they could give Mozilla the intelligence to launch Nav 4, if available when it encounters a site using Netscapes old object model.

    While this is good news for the long term, I think that there are many sites using the Netscape DOM, (I'm guilty myself). Doesn't Rive's cool Window Maker simulator, for instance, rely on it?
  • The way I see it, Netscape introduced the DOM to web browsers, as a way to allow JavaScript to manipulate the browser and documents within it.

    The W3C decided that the DOM should be handled differently, that's what made Netscape's approach proprietary.

    Sure Netscape has introduced a number of proprietary things into browsers, like background colors and images, alot of them eventually became standards. Think of how bland looking web pages were before Navigator 1.1. If we had relied upon standards bodies to come up with this stuff, we probably would have to wait a few years longer.
  • As the browser wars rage on, Netscape dump support for their Proprietary DOM and a few million web developers stare, perplexed, at their "best viewed in Netscape" badges -- now rendered redundant.

    Uh, yeah, as if 0.1% of those ridiculous, tacky-ass badges ever represented anything actually Netscape-specific other than the ancient blink tag.

  • I think it's perfectly fine that Mozilla has dropped NS4 code. For the smart webdevelopers who've been using an API for their JavaScript applications it will make everything a whole lot nicer for them - all you gotta do is "port" the API to Mozilla and you're done.
  • The Junkbuster proxy (available for Unix and Windows) is a great little utility that can get rid of annoying banner ads. It simply uses a 'blocklist' to stop ads and a whitelist to allow cookies from certain domains.

    For instance Slashdot loads a damned sight faster with it, but you can configure it so that your registration cookie still gets set.

    Check it out at:

    http://www.junkbuster.com/

    Oh yeah, it's free ...


    Chris Wareham
  • hm. Interesting observation. You must be new to this "computer thing", so let me clue you in. It's been this way since the beginning of time. It's been one of the great arguments FOR single-platform dominance. If you eliminate all the competition, the one remaining dominant player will stop trying to spit out alpha-quality releases to get a feature leg-up on the enemy, and they'll simply sit-back and slowly, and carefully produce quality code.

    As if.

    Do we see this from MS in the OS market? How about the Productivity app market?

    The culture that mainstream software is fostering is, sell CD's, make money. Sell CD's, make money. If the product is shoddy, support will fix it. If support costs too much, we'll just charge for it and make support a profit center.

    I guess stating any more about this topic in this forum is preaching to the choir. . .

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • Smart webdevelopers do use JavaScript - but sparingly. It's great for a little form validation (takes the strain off of the server) and working out what the client's browser is.

    This whole DHTML thing is a little bit tiring though. It seems like the world of graphic designers and marketing people have finally got their way with DHTML ...

    I still snigger when I recall the time I set up a website for a company I worked at. As the only Internet savvy individual there I got lumbered with the task, (after a supposedly 'professional' firm failed to produce the goods).

    The marketing manager tried to have me reprimanded for using the ''wrong pantone shade'' for the company logo, and for not ensuring it fitted perfectly on an A4 page(!).

    There again that's the same company that insisted on NT for the frontline application webserver, and then wondered why it handled high loads less happily than a SparcStation 1 running Linux ...


    Chris Wareham
  • I agree that Netscape 4's implementation of CSS was god-awful. I had a simple page that used CSS for backgrounds and other simple stuff. It displayed fine in both Opera and IE. w3.org validated the style sheet as correct.

    Netscape could not even display the page! I got a blank screen. I had to stop using stylesheets because of Netscape's awful browser.

    Netscape is a company that would rather spend millions suing Microsoft than fix their own defective product. How much would it have cost to fix the worst CSS bugs in Navigator? One million? Two million? I am sure Netscape spent several times that suing Microsoft.

    Netscape should stop putting out junk, or else the mere association of their name with Mozilla will kill the project.
  • That Netscape was stable enough for me to use? Heck yes.

    Unfortunately, it locks up my computer so often I was finally forced to d/l IE 5.0. To my great horror a Microsoft product has, so far at least, blown NS4.6 out of the water in both speed and reliability.

    To soothe my sense of conscience, I have of installed the Neoplanet "window dressing" over the core IE5 components. It just looks better to me.

    As soon as Netscape has a version of Mozilla ready to use, (or communicator 5.0) I will be more than happy to scrap IE off my system, I hope this DOM announcement is a sign of progress to that happy day.


    (Yes I've been previewing mozilla since M1, but to use it all the time? Sorry I'm just not that keen on frustration.)


    ~grell
    Wasurenaide - doko e itte mo soko ni iru yo.

  • I don't think there is an explicit array of divs. The DOM spec says an HTMLDocument has these members (among others):
    attribute HTMLElement body;
    readonly attribute HTMLCollection images;
    readonly attribute HTMLCollection applets;
    readonly attribute HTMLCollection links;
    readonly attribute HTMLCollection forms;
    readonly attribute HTMLCollection anchors;

    This explains why images[] works. It would appear that the way to find what you're looking for is document.body.getElementsByTagName("DIV").item(n) but that's just a guess.

  • Netscape has done more to subvert "web standards" than MS - by far.

    Look at some of my previous postings on dates of Navigator releases vs. CSS equivalents. Netscape as the great innovator and W3C as stale and slow is a myth.

    Look at how far Viola had come in 94/95 and compare to where we are today. Saddening, eh?

    /mill - who thinks Netscape should have kudos for deprecating their old proprieraty 'solutions' though
  • You seem to be confused about what DOM is. It has nothing to do with which tags do what, how the document is rendered, or how well CSS is supported. It is the framework by which you access the document contents from within scripts and applets. If you're only writing HTML, it doesn't affect you at all. It only affects you if you're doing scripting of some kind (and if you're really concerned about compatibility, you probably aren't.)
  • I notice that the x86-glibc2 version of Communicator for Linux has moved out of the unsupported directory into the supported one. No Sparc Linux version yet though ...

    Don't know if this makes any difference to the average Linux user ... but I still wonder if it's significant.


    Chris Wareham
  • Even on Linux, I prefer to use KDE or HotJava than Netscape.
    It's slow at rendering, and loading.

    Has anyone ever seen how badly it's paginating algorythm is? Whenever i resize the browser window, it has to repaginate the entire page. Sometimes it reloads it off the server again! I would never dare to try resizing the window while it's still downloading a page, sometimes it just craps up and never draws the page.

    IE on the other hand is multithreaded, but not only that has a decent pagination routine. If I resize the browser window, the page doesn't need to be redrawn, if images will move close or further apart as do DIVs, tables, cells and everything else. It even works while IE is still downloading.

    And in navigator, when you click on a link, the entire page is locked!!! So i can't click on another link while the current one is loading.
    It's no suprise that implementing DHTML to the extend IE does is a difficult job for Netscape, since they reply on just rerendering the entire page whenever something changes. Lame.

    Also, font support on Netscape are all stuffed.

    Do you people realise IE supports more web standards than Netscape? So what if it has some *extra* features.


    Some of the problems i mentioned like fonts are probably for cross platform compatability. But the pagination problems are unconfigurable.
  • Netscape 'extends' a standard and this is a 'good thing'

    Microsoft 'extends' a standard and this is a 'bad thing'

    You wouldn't care to explain that to me, would you ?

    Also, where do you draw the line ? Imagine there is a standard - RFC XXX - which is widely implemented. Company A releases a product that implements RFC XXX but also some 'proprietary' extensions, which it releases as a new RFC. Is this good or bad ?

    Or does it depend on who does the 'extending' ?
  • As a web developer ( http://www.idg.com, [idg.com] http://www.solutionsintegrator.com [solutionsintegrator.com] , http://www.idgmediagallery.com [idgmediagallery.com] ) I am very pleased to hear this news.

    My team develops relatively bland corporate web sites, and we do not make use of either browser's advanced features, simply because we never have enough resources to implement two versions of the cool, whizzy things that we would like to do. So NS5 not being backward compatible shouldn't break my sites, because the overlapping feature set of NS4 and IE4 defined the "lowest common denominator" for safe, robust web design.

    One standard is something that you can develop to. Two incompatible "standards" are something to discuss over lunch.

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