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Netscape The Internet

Mozilla now supports all CSS1 properties 51

Posted by Hemos from the layout-properly dept.
EmilEifrem writes "Looks like the Mozilla team's doing good: "The new layout engine now supports all CSS1 properties. Troy Chevalier implemented the last property, background-attachment, earlier this week. Some properties are still buggy, and one selector (the visited pseudo-class) isn't yet implemented. However, this is probably the most complete implementation of CSS1 so far, and the bug list is consistently getting shorter." Check story at MozillaZine. "
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Mozilla now supports all CSS1 properties More

Mozilla now supports all CSS1 properties

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  • XML support Available (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I haven't done any investigation into it, but it occurs to me that IE 5 was lauded by M$ as being the worlds first XML compliant browser.

    XML became a standard in February of 98. CSS2 became a standard in May of 98. XML is being implemented (again, I have no idea how well). CSS2 is not being implemented anywere, so far as I can tell, and CSS1 (very old) is only being implemented now.

    It doesn't exactly look promising for HTML and CSS.

  • Re:Mozilla a failure? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Mozilla project is healthy enough that companies are starting to bet their business on it. I'm heading a R&D department that will soon be devoting 4-5 full times developers to Mozilla, and others are doing the same. Mozilla may not have drawn that many part time "itch scratching" developers just yet - it's been damn tough for new people to get started with it until recently. But it's by no means "AOL/Netscape only" anymore.

    The June (or July?) beta will be important: At that point you'll have a whole lot new users starting to play with it. That should draw more interest from other developers too.

  • Re:Mozilla a failure? (Score:4)

    by davie ( 191 ) on Friday April 30, 1999 @10:22AM (#1908976) Journal

    Personally, I think JWZ's departure and subsequent comments were all about sour grapes. I didn't expect mozilla to be "hacker friendly" for at least a year, I don't understand why anyone would have. Granted, the project has a bit of a "family atmosphere," but what else should we expect?

    In hindsight, dumping the legacy rendering engine will probably be seen as the salvation of mozilla. It's smaller, faster and easier to maintain, at least according to the comments I've read from developers. After the code stabilizes we'll probably see gecko popping up in all kinds of applications and a lot more interest in development. I think mozilla is going to put the screws to Internet Exploder and will eventually become the de facto standard against which other browsers are measured.

  • I need (Score:1)

    by Shaman ( 1148 )
    ...a Solaris binary. Damned if I can get Mozilla to compile on a Solaris system with GNU tools.
  • If the standard wasn't it place (even though
    various versions of it were available), why
    did MS try to implement into IE3 -- because
    as it is, the IE3 CSS support is broken to the
    point of hiding valid content with
    valid CSS even if the CSS code wasn't
    meant to do that.

    An adage used in CIWAH suggests that Lynx is
    really the best browser because it *doesn't*
    support all the netscape-isms and such. I
    think this also applies to CSS -- unless
    the implementation is nearly 100% (such as
    IE4 & 5, or Opera), it should be ignore so
    that the content isn't affected at all.
    This is why NS4.x is a bane of many page
    developers, because while it's CSS support is
    there for fonts, colors, etc, it does
    so many wrong things when it comes to the
    layout that it's almost necessary to develop
    a CSS for NS alone, in addition to the IE3 and
    the generic CSS sheet. (Or tell the users
    to disable CSS by disabling JavaScript, but
    that's another can of worms).

    The same with HTML4.0 -- there's a lot of
    features in that that can be used to the web
    designer's advantage (OBJECT), but even with
    the spec finallized, IE5 still came out without
    full compliant support, so designers still have
    to struggle to make pages work. But, oh yes,
    IE5 supports XML! I think moves like this are
    again only aimed at PHBs to get the product
    supported, but do little for the web developer
    or end consumer.
  • CSS is supported to some extent on all but
    one browser, that one being IE3 which has so
    much broken CSS support, it's not funny. And
    browsers that don't know anything about CSS
    support it, generally, because they will render
    the page without it (aka lynx), so using CSS
    on a non-CSS browser will get you graceful
    degragation.

    And as pointed out, you probably use sites every
    day that use CSS, and don't know it, because
    it's supposed to be invisible to the end user.

    It's not that CSS is dying out now, but it's
    been slow to catch on, as people find table layout
    a terrible approach to web design and accessibility
    comes into play.

  • Re:Argh! Drop CSSn and get it out (Score:5)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Friday April 30, 1999 @09:26AM (#1908980)
    I don't think so. First, here's a quote from
    w3's page:

    Will XSL replace CSS?

    No. They are likely to co-exist since they meet different needs. XSL is intended for complex
    formatting where the content of the document might be displayed in multiple places; for
    example the text of a heading might also appear in a dynamically generated table of contents.
    CSS is intended for dynamic formatting of online documents for multiple media; its strictly
    declarative nature limits its capabilities but also makes it efficient and easy to generate and
    modify in the content-generation workflow. So they are two different tools; for some tasks,
    CSS is the appropriate choice and for some tasks, XSL. They can also be used together - use
    XSL on the server to condense or customize some XML data into a simpler XML document, then
    use CSS to style it on the client.

    Secondly, most average web authors will for the next 2 to 3 years will still be using HTML for
    most pages, and CSS is the only way to format
    these types of pages.

    However, the apparent problem with CSS is that it
    has been standardized by the W3 group for several
    years, and only *now* are we seeing fully compatible browsers, mostly due to the trail ends
    of the browser wars. It's a shame that there
    is all this tech in web content delievery that
    an author cannot take advantage of because
    of incomplete browsers.
  • I think Netscape/Mozilla has made an amazing number of techinally sound decisions since they went Open Source(TM).

    Like for example following and implementing standards, instead of their previous policy of "let's drink some beer, hack a couple of new tags (like `blink') into the code, and let someone else try to describe it".

    Maybe JWZ misses the old days, I don't!
  • I have read many comments in the media claiming that the Mozilla project has effectively failed to exploit the masses of un-tapped programming talent that were to supercharge Communicator, that most of the work is still done by Netscape employees. Further there is that story a while ago about Mozilla staff being layed off. Does anyone really know exactly how healthy this project is?

    --

  • microsoft.com, compaq.com, cnn.com, go.com (abc, disney, etc), and numerous others make use of CSS.

    Look at http://www.w3.org/Style "Why two style sheet languages". XSL isn't supposed to be applied to HTML.

    HTML sucks in general. CSS sucks because of redundancy. BUT it is the only thing we got and best thing is to improve the bad parts. Getting support for CSSn will make people use it. Just see what happened when Netscape introduced frames and font. Both are crap and still people use them.

    /mill
  • Uh, who do you think are sitting in these working groups? Netscape and Microsoft.

    If we have been able to implement postscript interpreters for years CSSn shouldn't be any problem. The problem has been that the implementors rather spent time making up their own proprieraty 'solutions'. They could have been implementing CSSn support, but chose not to.

    FYI, W3C do actually implement these concepts they are recommending. See Amaya/Thot and Jigsaw for example.

    /mill


  • People have been busy implementing frames, font, layers, marquee, blink, and all kinds of k3wl stuff. Not to mention active desktops and channels.

    /mill
  • i wish mozilla.org would 'digitus dextractus for a year now the s/w industry has been waiting for an alternative to ie5 (yes something on systems other than windows). i dont want to hear wineing about 'lack of developer support' or 'why dont u help et.,al.

    it would be nice to have a 'standards compliant' browser sometime this century. come aol spend some of those resources and get that mozilla beast out the door...ms ie is kicking yr but wrt business!
  • XSL isn't finished yet. XML linking isn't finished yet. Are you saying we should wait for those things to be finished before Mozilla 1.0?

  • I am getting sick of using MSIE just to check certain CSS attributes (background, etc) that Netscape can't handle. Mozilla rules!

  • I have read many comments in the media claiming that the Mozilla project has effectively failed to exploit the masses of un-tapped programming talent...

    You make it sound like they had one shot and now it is over. Just because Mozilla hasn't been worked on by *that* many people outside Netscape doesn't mean it won't be eventually. As soon as Gecko hits 1.0 and people can start using it, they will start fixing bugs and adding features. Especially if it can easily be downloaded and built.

    I think this is an important fact that people often overlook: people need to be able to easily download, debug, edit, recompile, and test the package. It is very easy to do this with most free software packages out there but it definitely isn't the case with Mozilla, last time I checked.

  • The W3C itself keeps failing to set practical, viable standards. Why does anyone pay attention to a self-appointed maker of so-called standards, if these standards are apparently produced out of thin air, without a proven concept or implementation? The more useful later releases of the HTML standard only made sense because there were already good implementations in the mainstream browsers of most of the new features. CSSn, while it does help site designers to some extent, is an utter failure because noone has managed to implement CSS1 fully until recently (if Mozilla in its present unreleased state counts at all...).

    Standards should be drafted based on proven designs, not the other way round. Most RFC's are based on working code, why can't this be expected from the W3C?

    Let's hope that XML/XSL turns out the be simple and consistent enough in practice to make up for some of the obscenities in web design that HTML + all the incompatible extensions have made necessary. (Allow me to be sceptical, since approximately 1 1/2 years have passed since the introduction of XML by the W3C and I don't see it being used much...)

  • My Box Acid Test Screenshots [erisx.com] page, now updated to include MSIE 5.0 (which doesn't do much better than IE4 did, btw).

    Go, Mighty Lizard, go! :-)

  • I disagree with your argument that "lack of support" for CSS will kill it. Firstly, 90% of *MY* visitors are using a >= 4.x browser. Secondly, CSS pages look just fine in the other browsers.

    So here's another point: even if less than 90% of my visitors used css enabled browsers, I would still use it, because those other users are not going to notice anything "wrong" with my page.

    -- Donovan

  • This IS the most complete CSS1 implementation (ct) (Score:3)

    by Avus ( 9506 ) on Friday April 30, 1999 @09:05AM (#1908995)
    c't [heise.de] has a comprehensive test and description of CSS (wannabe) capable browser (unfortunately not online). Gecko is best, even in version M3, followed by Opera and IE5.

    Things look pretty bad on the CSS 2 side, though.

    Anyway, with IE5 trying to undermine the web standards it's excellent to see Mozilla make progress.

  • I haven't done any investigation into it, but it occurs to me that IE 5 was lauded by M$ as being the worlds first XML compliant browser.


    Except it's not. MSIE 5 fails to implement XML to spec.

  • IE3? What the hell are you thinking? IE3 made a valiant effort to be css compliant. The standard wasn't there yet, so things don't work exactly right, but it's better than NN3 which has close to NO css support.


    NN3 has no css support, which is better than broken css support. IE3 thinks that 1em = 1px. If you don't know why this is really bad, then do some more research. IE3 has to be specifically excluded from stylesheets because its support is so bad.

    Not that I'm defending NN4.x


    Why not include your style sheet, and then put some font tags in for backward (NN3) compatibility?? Include your css-p div's below the /html, hide them from your "stupid" browsers like ie3 and nn3 by putting style or open ended table tags around them with JS, and be done with it.


    The point of stylesheets is that we don't have to do this stupid shit anymore. We can code up a set of content and have it display in a usable manner on every browser. If you're trying this hard, then you're doing something wrong.

    And there's a good reason not to care about fonts at all.

  • XSL isn't finished yet. XML linking isn't finished yet. Are you saying we should wait for those things to be finished before Mozilla 1.0?


    Quite possibly, yes. Or rather, have Mozilla released without these modules. I'd rather see no implementation than an incorrect implementation that people will start to use. Unless the implementation is forward-compatible, which is tough to do when all you have is a draft spec.

  • 1. I never use em, no need, it can't hurt me if I don't touch it right?


    Except that em and % are two of the most useful size units in CSS. It allows elements to be sized relative to how the user wants to see them, instead of in an absolute manner, which can hinder usability. Unfortunately, the IE 3 screws up em very badly, and NN4 screws up % rather badly as well. (sigh)


    3. When you have a large audience you have to cover all your bases, so you have to do all that "stupid shit" so you know it looks the same everywhere


    If you're trying to do that, then you're doing the wrong thing. My page will /never/ look the same on a PalmPilot as it does it Mozilla. Nor will it "look the same" if the user overrides my font selections. This is a straw man that's not even worth aiming for. A web page doesn't "look" like anything. It just has possible renderings, some of which may not be visual at all.

    (And yeah, I know...try convincing the suits of that -- I do, and it usually fails, but it's worth trying for anyway.).


    I've just learned over the years that it's better to make a page with the added functionality for the users of new tech that is also completely backward compatible. Yeah, it's a bitch, but that's what I get paid for.


    That's what I get paid for, too. And that's the exact point of CSS. No matter what, some users get a usable version of the page (if you're doing things right) -- some users may just get a better-looking experience. If your content is interesting, it won't really matter too much to the users.
  • CSS Level 1 became a W3C Recommendation on 17 December, 1996. CSS Level 2 was finalized a year ago this May. Why does it take this long?

    On a side note, StyleMaster 1.3 shipped this week from an Australian Company, Western Civilisation [westciv.com], and includes fantastic help for determining which CSS features are implemented correctly in various browsers. I was so impressed I went to kagi and paid for it after an hour of use.


  • You are assuming that websites = pubic websites. Internal "Intranet" websites where you have a controlled client base can and do use CSS.

    --
  • I don't think we're going to see any real work with Mozilla source code by people outside Netscape for a little while yet. One of the real benefits of having the souce code available is that it will now be much easier to embed a web browser in all sorts of applications...with the added bonus of being able to modify the browser that is embedded (something that isn't possible with IE and OLE/ActiveX ).

  • I am not a Mozilla contributor, but IIRC it's not just Mozilla employees that are contributing. The situation is that while only 30 non-Netscape developers have CVS commit privileges, many other outside developers have submitted and are continuing to submit code to Mozilla. They just don't have CVS commit privileges, probably because you wouldn't want to trust just anyone with commit privileges to your code repository.

    Of course, I could be way off base on this, but at one point this is what I read on Slashdot. Sorry, I don't have a reference URL for this.

  • I can only help you if you're using Solaris/x86 2.6 (assuming it compiles this time around.)

    More info in 2-3 hours.
  • Well, I can't host the 25-MB tar.gz file that I've created as I only have 3 MB.

    I'm not sure of all the stuff that is needed but I tarred up the entire mozilla/dist directory and followed symlinks. (Otherwise most files wouldn't be there...)

    Besides, there are still too many bugs in it, number one being that buttons in HTML don't seem to work!
  • CSS works really well for Intra / Extranet situations where you can control which clinet a user must use to access the site.
  • IE3? What the hell are you thinking? IE3 made a valiant effort to be css compliant. The standard wasn't there yet, so things don't work exactly right, but it's better than NN3 which has close to NO css support. NN4 was worse than IE3 because externally linked css crashed it. Not until 4.5 came out was that fixed. IE4 and 5 have the best so far as far as I'm concerned.

    I think your thinking CSS-P. IE3 doesn't support that because it was practically not even invented yet. But for christ sake man, give credit where credit is due.

    Granted CSS (esp css2) is not completely supported on any major platform, and god knows I want it to succeed. I think table layout is the most inconvenient method of placement there is, but what is the big deal? Why not include your style sheet, and then put some font tags in for backward (NN3) compatibility?? Include your css-p div's below the /html, hide them from your "stupid" browsers like ie3 and nn3 by putting style or open ended table tags around them with JS, and be done with it.

    __

  • 1. I never use em, no need, it can't hurt me if I don't touch it right?

    2. I thought that NN3 didn't have any css support, but I used the "close to NO" just incase someone knew something that I didn't (there are quite a bunch of people like that)

    3. When you have a large audience you have to cover all your bases, so you have to do all that "stupid shit" so you know it looks the same everywhere

    I've just learned over the years that it's better to make a page with the added functionality for the users of new tech that is also completely backward compatible. Yeah, it's a bitch, but that's what I get paid for.

    __

  • If the standard wasn't it place (even though various versions of it were available), why did MS try to implement into IE3 -- because as it is, the IE3 CSS support is broken to the point of hiding valid content with valid CSS even if the CSS code wasn't meant to do that.

    I don't know, I don't work for them

    I think moves like this are again only aimed at PHBs to get the product supported, but do little for the web developer or end consumer.

    Well said! I'm supporting the WaSP myself, and I'm hoping that we can get a standard HTML/XML parser "lib" and have every browser include it to display the content. Let them do anything they want to the rest of the GUI.


    __

  • No one should hold back the release of any browser to build in CSS support. Its a dead technology. Even the W3 people have moved on to XML/XSL development.
  • Firstly, adoption of CSS by websites is nil and will stay nil.

    No website that wants repeat visitors is going to adopt a new technology that isn't supported on at least 90% of the browsers visitors are using.

    As an amendment to my earlier mail I'll offer that both CSS and XSL are dud technologies. Don't think I am saying people should give up on CSS to work on XSL. I'm simply saying that CSS support shouldn't hold back Mozilla.

    You'd better get used to HTML 3.2 - its all your going to see for at least a decade.
  • Good it is but perfect it ain't. The CSS1 documentation gives a neat way of doing drop-caps, and I toyed with it in an idle moment. Mozilla (Gecko) renders the drop caps *up* from the line; Star Office, interestingly, renders them correctly (although it gets lots of other stuff wrong).
  • But i'm going to still have to check out my CSS on older netscapes as half the stuff I try to do crashed netscape.

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