Last night I attended the Silicon Valley Web Guild meeting. At this particular meeting they had a project manager from IE and one for Netscape come and explain their browsers and what they plan to get them to do vis a vis standards.
The Microsoft guy, Michael Wallent, Group Program Manager for IE, spoke first. He opened with the question, "How many of you think I'm inherently evil, was born evil, or just became evil when I sold my soul and went to work for Microsoft?" He said that IE had a goal for 100% standard compliance, but noted that sometimes compliance comes into conflict with previously supported behaviors. In these instances, MS often opts to continue to support the previous content. He said that in the past when they had dropped support for certain behaviors, customers called up to complain that their content had broken, and they wanted to avoid that in the future. He also said that they also were prioritizing which standards get adopted first, giving the example of "first-letter, first-line" being more important than "whitespace: pre" which may never get included (or not in the forseeable future).
He also made the point that "numbers are misleading"; in other words, what does 80% compliance mean? Does it mean 80% of CSS properties are supported? Does it apply to how many pages using CSS are supported properly, etc. He briefly touched on the idea of using doc sniffing in the browser to determine whether it should render the page with backwards compatibility or new standards, but he didn't go into the issue.
I eventually got the impression that IE is viewed more as a cog in the Microsoft vision to incorporate intranet functionality with the desktop rather than as the browser of choice for your average surfer. He mentioned how Office2000 can make vector art, and said that since no one wants their vectored art to become rasterized and saved as a gif (because you can't edit again as a vector after that) that IE was going to incorporate tags which would themselves provide support for Microsoft vector graphics (so when you exported your page from Office2000 the code that it would use would be the MS tags for throwing together the vectored art.) I have no idea what would happen if such a page were viewed in another browser... This subject is referred to as Behavior Extensions of CSS and more information can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/becss. He also talked about SMIL-boston standards briefly, and the URL with more info is here: http://www.w3c.org/TR/smil-boston.
His final comments on standards included "sometimes standards don't catch up as much as we'd like" and "Microsoft will continue to invest in standards as part of Internet Explorer". The most important standard, he said, is existing content. And he reaffirmed that MS will work with the W3C or other appropriate committees to capture future innovations.
The Netscape person, Eric Krock, Senior Product Manager, Netscape Communicator, took advantage of the confrontation theme of the night. He had apparently come down with larangytis the night before and opened by kidding the Microsoft guy, "I know you guys are known for anti-competitive behavior, but germ warfare?!"
His presentation was entitled: "W3C Standards in Web Browsers: Who's going for 100%?" His premise, Netscape's, is that we all really want 100% compliance with W3C standards, no excuses. He did acknowledge that the Netscape 4 versions were nothing to write home about (his words) but basically said it was a whole new ballgame with Gecko. It was rebuilt from the ground-up with the intent to be fully compliant, fast, and sleek (of minimal file size - apparently one of the early versions fit on a single floppy (and not a 20M floppy, as someone in the crowd suggested...)).
He then launched a demonstration with the boxacid test (I didn't catch the URL) and some other similar tests to show how Gecko and IE compared in terms of support for HTML 4.0, XML, XML Namespaces, CSS1/2, DOM1/2, and RDF. Netscape clearly showed more compatability for those standards. Someone later asked the question about backwards compatibility. Whereas Microsoft chose to support it, Netscape wants to move full speed ahead away from some of the more useless bits of proprietary standards they'd used in the past. The new mantra appeared that if it is proprietary, it won't be in Gecko (an audience member wondered that if they were the only game in town using the standards, then didn't the standards become de facto proprietary, but the Netscape guy - and perhaps the rest of the audience - didn't buy that notion). Another audience member asked about "layers" support, and the Netscape attitude appeared to be that because the layer tag was so inconsistently supported, most people never bothered to use them anyway so there wouldn't be major problems with too much content suddenly being worthless. I suppose if you have a layers-using page that might be sour news, but Netscape is insistent on getting their browser completely compliant this time. Some things we can look forward to that were mentioned are full 100% support for CSS1, up-aligned images, good "first-line" support, custom bullets, a DOM2/CSS interface (you can make a link move when it is clicked), images as form buttons, and strong XML support.
He said that standards support is not an end unto itself, but rather it is a means to an end, that end being to build good content. He showed off what CSS and XML could do with a travel site made to use the latest and greatest standards, and a spreadsheet application written with XML. Think of what it means, he said, if major office applications could be free web apps... and run on any operating systems... Because XML content can be reformatted on the fly it's not necessary to go back to the server to reconfigure it.
Gecko isn't so much a browser as we've come to think about them but a layout engine. That engine can basically build the application around itself (the menu bars that will be part of the browser in Gecko will actually be rendered web material). This technique can free application programmers from having to use proprietary OS APIs.
Other facts that were mentioned for those who are interested is Adam Lock's ActiveX wrapper (win32) which makes gecko avialbale as an ActiveX control) and that anyone is invited to go to Mozilla.org to help out the debugging process, no programming experience required.
This was basically it for the presentation, there were some questions at the end. I asked the question of what either vendor thought web developers were going to do what with all these old browsers still out there. While that can be controlled for in intranet environments, how do we get all the people using unconforming 2-3-4.x browsers to make the switch (Because if they don't, there's no point in getting to create all these snazzy new things with the standards). Netscape's position was that Gecko will be so small, so easy, that people will not in any way be inhibited from upgrading. I kind of wonder to what extent people will be willing and able to upgrade, but the idea of there being a) a critical mass of pages which require a true standards-compliant browser, and b) no significant download time to install it certainly helps the process of getting the world to the same level of viewing ability.
Microsoft basically concurred with the premise that performance issues would drive the upgrading impulse. He said how there was some marked increase in performance with IE 5 over 4 and he feels confident that improved performance will keep people willing and able to make the switch when necessary.
As for release dates, Microsoft said they are working away on new stuff but have no announced timeline, but when it was suggested that they might be delaying later browser versions he said that they had not in all the time he'd been there let the schedule slip. Netscape said that he couldn't give a date for Gecko release, but that there would be more news in a few weeks and in the meantime welcomed people to download the latest beta.
That's it, this is all I remember it. I think I've quoted fairly or with the basic gist and tried not to editorialize too much...
c. 1999 Cathy Gellis
cathyg@csua.berkeley.edu
www.csua.berkeley.edu/~cathyg
Blog: www.cathygellis.com