[thelist] Netscape 6 thread

Eric Miller eric at OAKTREE.com
Thu Dec 7 12:14:44 CST 2000


<rant>
heh. I guess the bitter and disillusioned part of me wonders about "time and
cost restraints"...what, two and a half years of development with a large
part of it being free contributions from open-source developers who
contributed their time gratis.  

I would expect that after that amount of time, that I'd be able to
successfully install NN6 on my Win 98 machine at home.  nope.  or that on my
Mac at work, I'd be able to launch without a Feedback Agent crash report
window popping up every time, or that my "back" and "forward" buttons would
be consistently visible.  nope and nope.  And I'd like to think that I'm not
a computing idiot, though my Javascript/ASP post from earlier this week
might lead you to think otherwise...
</rant>

and here's another thing that's wacky...from a page I was working on
yesterday.
a href="mailto:?subject=the subject&body=put this in the body"

NN6/Mac doesn't see that there's deliberately no addressee, and doesn't just
skip to the subject line as other browsers do.  instead it puts one word in
each "to" box, resulting in lots of invalid addresses composed of words that
were correctly directed to other locations in the mail.  I can't tell from
the W3C spec whether or not the attributes should have been supported, but
in any case it looks like they didn't program the app to parse out
"destination=value" pairs like every other client...

grrr...

Eric

-----Original Message-----
From: Aylard JA (James) [mailto:jaylard at equilon.com]

Peter-Paul Koch wrote:

> It's partly a question of conservatism: web developers don't change their 
> scripts if it isn't necessary (if browsers continue to support NAME), so 
> browsers can't ignore NAMEs or else the scripts won't work any more.

	...and we must remember that Netscape's decision not to provide
backwards-compatibility for most of Netscape 4.x's proprietary DOM was not
the result of a high-minded crusade for standards-compliance, but due to
time and cost restraints. And this lack of support for Netscape's prior
proprietary features is arguably, IMO, its greatest weakness.




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