[WEB4LIB] The future of browsing?

[Thomas Dowling]

----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew I. Mutch <amutch at tln.lib.mi.us>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 09, 1998 8:35 AM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] The future of browsing?


>I'm curious as to the reaction to Netscape's soon-to-be released browsing
>engine "Gecko".
>
>See: http://home.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease711.html
>
>Gecko is supposed to fit on one disk and according to the press release
>"Gecko features full support for open Internet standards such as CSS,
>HTML4, DOM1, RDF and XML."  Is it possible that the browser manufacturers
>are coming to their senses and actually going in the right direction?!
>

Gecko is apparently a very minimal browser.  It seems to be the NGLayout
HTML rendering engine with just enough HTTP capability to do a GET, so
it's early days to comment on the eventual size of any program built
around it.

That said, it is the first fruit of the mozilla.org open source effort,
and as such demonstrates that this kind of development can actually get
you somewhere.  However, I'm not going to take a Netscape press release's
word for it that the new engine will actually support all of these
standards completely.  If it doesn't do THEAD, TFOOT, COL, COLGROUP,
OPTGROUP, et al, then it isn't really doing HTML 4.  For that matter, if
it doesn't do something with LINK, then it isn't really doing HTML 2.
Likewise, if it doesn't do :first-line and :first-letter, !important,
@import, list-style-image, background-attachment: fixed et al, it isn't
really doing CSS1.

Bearing in mind that W3C recommendations represent a consensus among
members, even an implicit promise to support them, I'm not going to get
*too* excited about the industry leader being only two years late on
supporting some of these.

Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu