Pick one: standards or a browser

Submitted by djc on November 7, 2000 - 08:29.

Although he'll(and possible I'll) get flamed for saying it, I'm glad someone had the nerve to stand up to 'groups' like the WaSP. Sure they, Flanagan, and everyone under the sun can bitch about Mozilla being late. Wah. The problem is, as Chris points out, is that the only thing they actually want to do is bitch and moan about things. Even if Mozilla or Netscape were 100% compliant, they'd still find something to bitch about. IMHO, they should try making some constructive contributions to Mozilla and the like, otherwise, they have no right to complain about them.

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Submitted by r937 on November 7, 2000 - 16:34.

i really don't know much about browser development, but it appears to be exceedingly difficult -- because they're all buggy to one degree or another (take a look at RichInStyle's bug list)

however, let us not forget that netscape is owned by AOL, which is currently involved in a humungous pissing contest with Microsoft, a war in which the browser plays a relatively small part

i can't imagine there are too many "suits" on both sides holed up in lavish corner offices somewhere, with pie charts and impact analyses, evaluating just how buggy their browser can be, how big a hit to mindshare they can endure for not being as cross-browser as the other side

groups like the WaSP are probably no more than a nuisance to them, like a fat old angry bumblebee at a picnic

but then, like i said, i really don't know much about browser development

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Submitted by isaac on November 7, 2000 - 23:56.

djc, how about playing fair? In August last year, you were encouraging everyone to sign a petition with WSP to ask Microsoft to make their next version of IE standards compliant. Suddenly it's not OK for the same to occur with a competitor (one heavily affiliated with the Mozilla project which you strongly support)? I think that WSP's 'constructive contribution' is trying to ensure that the Mozilla effort does result in a standards compliant browser (via a future release of Mozilla or Netscape 6). Another non-compliant browser helps no one. A project being "open source" does not mean that it is free from criticism just because "everyone can scratch their own itch". Not everyone can, and/or can be bothered contributing to the project. They still have every right to offer suggestions, petition, criticise, etc. It appears to me that WSP and Flanagan have been trying to get Netscape to use the latest (or eventual) bugfree code from Mozilla. The first official release of Netscape 6 will be the one that gets the most attention, and not the subsequent 6.0.1 update that fixes bugs. If that first release isn't as good as it could easily be, then it could be seen as a disservice to users and the people who contributed to the project. The MozillaZine rant by Chris Nelson is exactly that: a rant. Time vs Compliance is the compromise. It's already obvious that Netscape 6 and the Mozilla project are behind whatever schedule they've set, and if there is a "browser war" they're not going to win it in a hurry. Personally, I'd be happy to see them wait it out for a bit if it means that we get a compliant browser that doesn't add to the everyday difficulties of writing client-side code for the Web.

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Submitted by djc on November 8, 2000 - 09:03.

First off isaac, I'm not trying to be unfair here. If you notice, I *dont* say that I think Netscape's decision(if in fact, it *is* their decision) to ship a no complaint NS6 is a good thing. At the time I wrote that short blurb about the WASP 15 months ago, I thought they had a good idea - maybe a petition by a group like them would do something. It has become somewhat apparent though, that the WaSP - and groups like it - would rather sit back, compain, sign petitions, and wait for the tooth fairy to deliver a compliant browser rather than actually do *anything* about it, except sign petitions, etc. And I would be interested to know, exactly, how the WaSP constructivly contributes to ensuring a standards complaint browser. As for Mozilla being open source, I'm not sure why you bring that up, rather than to make some statement that because its open source, people have every right to bash it however they choose. Further(and I know i'll get it on this), if one can't contribute or offer constructive offerings to something(whether thats software or anything else), one's suggestions and critisms of that product carry little weight.

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Submitted by olineham on November 8, 2000 - 17:12.

This is politics. Mozilla and Netscape are trying to do a job (akin to the government). Groups like the WaSP are a lobby group, trying to influence things for the benefit of those they represent.

The WaSP say they represent "everyone" because standards help us all. To a large extent, that is true. But the WaSP is clearly primarily a web developer lobby group.

It isn't fair to accuse the WaSP of complaining and never doing anything. Many of us web developers cannot reasonably be expect to help develop a web browser. Analogy: Farmers can't all be expected to become politicians.

Governments are used to this natural order in governance. They know how to evaluate the various arguments being thrown at them, decide the best balance in order to proceed with their work, and manage the PR fallout if one group doesn't get what it wants.

Perhaps Mozilla and Netscape should look to political parties for how to handle interference from outside.

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Submitted by aardvark on November 8, 2000 - 21:27.

At this point, they've missed the boat. Get the damn thing out and perhaps into the AOL package this decade, and do what users are so used to (thanks to MS) — point releases and service packs. We all know the arguments on both sides, but let's be pragmatic about it. If they keep holding up against potentially changing standards, clearly changing expectations, and wildly changing competition, it will never make it out the door. Besides, it's the WSP, and by the state of the web today, nobody seems to listen to them anyway.

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Submitted by MartinB on November 9, 2000 - 04:26.

It would seem that Netscape (for the branded browser at least) are now concentrating on getting a release out. David Flanagan has been criticising Netscape for doing this at the expense of support for standards such as LiveConnect. Reading the Bugzilla reports, even the definition of 'must-fix' issues are subject to marketing and legal signoff, and are being backed out of the release candidate. However, this does not affect Mozilla. Mozilla doesn't suffer the same commercial pressures which Netscape has on it. Therefore, it can be more radical in insisting on compliance, and can be raided by the Netscape branch for stable patches to drop into point releases. Sounds like a sensible compromise to me.

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Submitted by isaac on November 9, 2000 - 17:21.

dan - WSP isn't a gang of browser coders. Nor do they represent a gang of browser coders. They represent people like us for the most part, and I'd be the first to admit that I'd have absolutely NFI where to start in programming a browser. As Oliver has said, WSP is a lobby group. That's their constructive contribution. It's all very well for people encouraging contribution to suggest that non-programmers assist by reporting bugs (as is often the case), but isn't the point here that Netscape is ignoring suggestions that the bugfixes are included? The first release of Netscape will probably be the most widely downloaded. It is in the best interest of developers concerned about the usual cross-platform/browser bullshit to make sure that a compliant and bugfree-as-possible browser is released first. If it is Netscape that Flannagan is petitioning, how is Mozilla being micro-managed? Isn't that a separate issue and a separate rant from Nelson's annoyance with the WSP?

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Submitted by djc on November 9, 2000 - 17:58.

As far as the WSP is concerned, I've one more thing to say before dragging this on even more. I have zero respect for a 'lobby group' that constructs opinions based on popular opinion of the day(example) to rattle up press coverage from trade rags. Last July the WSP criticized Netscape for their delays and asked them to take 4.x off the market in a big time 'press release' and to just get a browser released, even with its bugs. Now that NS has done these things that the WSP asked, the WSP is back on them for doing just what the WSP 'demanded' the first time! If it sounds f-cking ridiculous, it is!!! As for Flanagan, his cries of injustice are falling on deaf ears. The Netscape 6.0 RTM(release to manufacturing) date, when the CD's etc get pressed and shipped, was over 2 weeks ago. Why the !@#$ wasn't he bitching about bugs then? Why wait till after the cat is out the door to close it? If he was truely interested in standards compliance, he would have mentioned these bugs before the RTM. His talking about how 'they could have fixed those bugs' is a good spin on his part. Sure they could have fixed the bugs if the CD's weren't being pressed and the final version being shipped. Its really quite disenchanting to hear people bitch and moan about this story without knowing all the facts. Finally, Mr. Flanagan states, "developers who have eagerly looked forward to 'sixth-generation' browsers that are finally standards compliant may be disappointed by Netscape's offering." If he's so dissapointed by Netscapes offering, where is his petition to Microsoft to make them ship a standards compliant version 6 browser? If he did some testing, he'd find that Netscape 6 is by far the most complaint commercial browser that will be out there, easily beating IE6 in every aspect of standards compliance. Interesting how people want to focus on Netscape/Mozilla here. Why not take a step back and get a glimpse of the bigger picture here?

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Submitted by isaac on November 9, 2000 - 22:32.

I remember that we had an article a while back about the extremely high-level of compliance of IE5.5/Mac... I tend to agree that the WSP are whining goons who seem to have unreasonable demands. But I can see the importance in the first release of Netscape 6 being as compliant as possible. As an aside, haven't the WSP and Flanagan both been harrassing Netscape? Not Mozilla? How has Mozilla been "micro-managed"? Now, obviously Mozilla is supported by Netscape who AFAIK provide developers, etc. But it's an open project. "Many eyes make bugs shallow" and features exceptionally easy to complete, right?

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Submitted by kubecerf on November 10, 2000 - 08:07.

Irony of ironies, slashdot open sourcer's having a kat fight for something owned by the borg AOL. Netscape is so irrelevant, but this is a funny story.

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Submitted by themadman on November 14, 2000 - 08:56.

Oh boy! Dan should really join the other list, where a whole bunch of WaSP members hang out. :) (and so do I, FWIW). Interestingly, CNET thinks that Netscape 6 is the most standards compliant browser yet. I just want it all to end. I have spent countless hours working around Netscape 4.x quirks, and even though I started my browsing with version 0.9, I'm sick of how crappy it became. Please... I just want to make one version of a site and have it work with everything. (Foolish web developer's prayer)

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Submitted by schampeo on November 14, 2000 - 15:25.

I just have one question for djc: what would you have the WSP do differently?

I'm a member of the WSP steering committee, as well as the sysadmin currently responsible for hosting the site, running the mailing lists (as soon as we get them back online, after a months-long outage due to yet another corporate pissing match) and so forth. I also run my own Web design firm and hosting service, write articles and books that help developers work around incompatibilities, run the mailing list cold_logic linked to above, and so forth. I'm not a C++ developer, and simply don't have the time or skills necessary to develop a new browser or even to pitch in with development.

I, too, share the frustration with Netscape 4, with the caveat that it's based on the same rendering engine that they launched with back in 1995, and so have tried to remain rational about my frustrations, instead trying to do what I can with what I have available to me. This includes trying to ensure that developers are at least exposed to resources that they can use to educate themselves on the importance of standards; doing my best to speak for developers who share my concerns but who lack a unified voice; and try to influence the press so that standards compliance is considered equally important to other issues like usability, stability, and nifty new features that don't lessen the burden on developers building sites for those platforms.

I think that the primary contribution of the WSP has been to educate the press, using the only tool we really have available to us, the press release, and in that regard, we've been remarkably successful - note that before we started, standards weren't even registering on reviewers' radar. Now they are at the forefront, as you can see in the CNET review, for example.

Sure, we sometimes go off half-cocked, and our stands may seem inconsistent at times, but the primary goal hasn't changed since 1998: to act as a sorely-needed lobbying organization, to do what the W3C cannot, namely, to pressure browser vendors to make standards their top priority. In doing so, we've run afoul of everyone, depending on your perspective. We alienated Microsoft by criticizing IE5, we alienated Netscape by criticizing the delays with Mozilla - caused by exactly the same focus on proprietary features like XUL that we asked them to place second behind standards support. It doesn't matter what we do, really - we always irritate and annoy someone. But in the end, we are seeing a move towards increased adoption of standards, and that's our goal.

Don't hate us because we're a lobbying organization. But I ask you to understand that wishing we were developers is as futile as trying to make CSS work in Navigator 3.

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Submitted by apartness on November 14, 2000 - 20:47.

This argument is so last week. Netscape 6 is out, and The Web Standards Project has endorsed it. David Flanagan was not criticizing Mozilla, Netscape, or standards. As a supporter of all three, he was requesting that Netscape incorporate existing bug fixes in the first commercial release of its browser, since that version of the browser will be the most widely used for quite some time. The Mozillazine response to this request was bizarrely emotional. "Sorry, the schedule is already in place, but thank you for supporting standards" would have sufficed. As it turns out, Mr Flanagan was correct; there are bugs in N6, notably a serious rollover issue in the Macintosh client. But hey, there are bugs in IE5, too (especially on the Windows side), and Netscape's browser represents the first wholehearted attempt to deliver XML and the DOM along with CSS, HTML 4, and ECMAScript. The WaSP endorses it on those grounds, and I think all of us are indebted to Netscape for hanging in there and delivering this browser. Comments that "WaSP just criticizes" have already been answered by schampeo, above. I'll add that we're merely a lobbying group. Nader didn't get under the hood and fix the Pinto himself, he simply pointed out that it was unsafe at any speed. In doing so, he saved lives. I'd also like to remind you that we are a small, ad hoc, self-created lobbying group with no funding, no staff, no resources. We're overworked human beings, like everyone on this list. We try to make a difference. It's possible that Netscape would have delivered a standards-compliant browser if the WaSP had not focused attention on the issue. It's possible that IE would have improved its CSS, HTML, and JavaScript support if the WaSP had not focused attention on the issue. It's possible that reporters would routinely talk about standards compliance (or lack thereof) if WaSP had not focused attention on the issue. But until we formed our group, Netscape and Microsoft were competing like traditional software companies (focusing on proprietary features instead of standards), the press was duly reporting on those proprietary features, and nobody was focusing on standards. We focused world attention on standards, and standards support has now improved considerably. Browser makers did the work, so they deserve the credit. But insulting us for trying to improve the web is mean-spirited, ignorant, or at the very least, thoughtless. While our peers were cashing in on the "web boom," we spent hours putting together petitions, writing editorials, managing mailing lists, and privately pleading or arguing with every browser developer who was willing to listen. How many hours have you given up to make the web better?

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Submitted by djc on November 14, 2000 - 23:43.

Yes, this argument is so last week. This whole thing did unravel (and was posted)last week in fact, however there are still a number of issues that people wish to address. Again, back to Mr. Flanagan, you state(as does he in his article) that this is somehow the 'first' commercial release of its browser. This is *not* the first commercial release of a web browser from Netscape. It's a new browser. It's simply the newest thing that Netscape has had to offer in a long ass time. Because it's new(and not just a 4.7x release), people will download it, try it out, and decide if they like it. As long as it doesn't reload the page when you resize the window, as long as it doesn't reload the page when they click 'back', and as long as it makes pages load faster(to what you and I know to be a table rendering issue in previous Navigators), they may just use it. Regular people could care less if createEntityReference() or Object.propertyIsEnumerable() are properly implemented. It's our job to make sure they never even know that those things aren't properly implemented. Sure, it sucks at times, but its a hell of a lot better than it was in 4.x. To be perfectly honest, I really don't think that these corporations care about what makes our(the developers) lives simpler. The users are the ones that matter to them. In a way, we can influence what the user sees and make them like one browser more than another - but only in a way. Some things, as Mr. Flanagan has shared, do in fact slip through the cracks. Sadly, it happens and hopefully Netscape will address those issues. (To get completely offtrack, I simply ask this: Since Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x were neck and neck a couple years back, how far has Microsoft come? How far has Netscape come? Microsoft has added token improvements to its 5.0 release (example) and seemed only concerned about integration with its OS and security fixes with its 5.5 release. It has gone from a 4.0 release to a 5.5 release in that time. Netscape Navigator has gone from being a 4.x release to a 4.7x to a 4.7y to a 4.7z to a complete re-write of its entire browser that is only now becomming usable in the same amount of time, but it now supports the very thing we're all talking about here, with a number of minor exceptions. Who has the better product from a personal and a WaSP perspective? Who will have the better browser from those same perspectives in another 3 months?) Finally to answer your last question, Jeff, I've given the last two years of my life to 'make the web better'. I've also spent hundreds of hours writing(1), managing mailing lists(2), and encouraging fellow web developers to help eachother here on evolt in a number of ways(3). We might not get the headlines on CNET or interviews with trade rags, but I think we've done a pretty kick ass job through word of mouth, a lot of hard work, and an honest approach. Don't paint me as the bad guy just because I don't happen to agree with what you say or tend to think.

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Submitted by apartness on November 15, 2000 - 03:47.

You have done that and I admire you for it. Evolt is a great resource. As, I hope, are WaSP and ALA. But please be fair. I'm not painting you as a bad guy because you "tend not to agree with" me. I'm not painting you as a bad guy at all! On the other hand, you said: "As far as the WSP is concerned, I've one more thing to say before dragging this on even more. I have zero respect for a 'lobby group' that constructs opinions based on popular opinion of the day(example) to rattle up press coverage from trade rags." "Rattling up press coverage from the trade rags" was exactly how we managed to get everyone focused on web standards. The "trade rags" shifted public opinion, and that helped persuade the browser makers to take developers seriously when we said we needed support for standards. As you yourself just said, "I really don't think that these corporations care about what makes our (the developers) lives simpler." And I agree. If it was just Glenn Davis and George Olsen and me and ten other people talking to Netscape and Microsoft, nothing much would have happened because it would be easy to write us off as a handful of relatively unimportant "customers." And they have much bigger constituencies to worry about. But by influencing public opinion, we showed them that we were speaking for many people, not just for ourselves: we were speaking for everyone who USES websites as well as everyone who builds them. And they were smart enough to realize that that was a huge "customer group" ... basically it was their ENTIRE customer group. Of course end-users don't know why sites crash or text is unreadable. They only know that it's so. And now they'll have something better. As to bending with public opinion, I don't know where you get that. (I saw it in Mozillazine as well.) Frankly, we've tried to SHAPE public opinion, not be shaped by it. And not for ourselves, but for a cause that benefits everyone who uses the web. So please, don't attribute false motivations to us or put us down for succeeding at making a small, positive difference. I have no grievance with you, but I think there is a misunderstanding here. Anyway, the fact that the browser is out and (despite a few bugs) offers the most standards compliance ever attempted is far more important than these quibbles.

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Submitted by hausmeista on November 15, 2000 - 05:02.

just to comment on djc's point about how the developers are more interested in the user experience than making life easy for developers. yes, that's a good point but how do you think the NN6 users will feel like if many of the pages they go and visit will show up buggy? i guess everyone will now make sure that the ecmascript they write is DOM compliant, but what about all the old pages? who's responsible for making them work?

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Submitted by mellowdown on November 15, 2000 - 15:17.

I've avoided weighing in on this, in no small part because (if you've followed it around the web) it's gotten pretty nasty at times. I'll preface this by saying I'm in no way affiliated with WaSP - I'm not even a member (though I guess I should be): If you want to attack WaSP because you disagree with one of their positions - fine. However, attacking their purpose, motivation, efficacy, or commitment to their positions is unfair and unreasonable. That seems to be an effect of this having gotten a little personal. I don't agree with every position that WaSP takes. On this position in particular in fact, I tended to support the release of the browser. Nonetheless WaSP, as has been suggested here, is not in this for money or glory. If you are a Web developer, they are on your side. The people behind the group donate their time - which I'm guessing is pretty valuable to them - for the good of the entire developer community. They took the lead in doing so, and have proven more effective than anyone else in providing a unified voice for Web developers And as admirably pointed out by by Schampeo, they may not be perfect, but their goal has been consistent since the organization's inception. I don't think that anyone can seriously question that they have done what they feel was the best thing to further those goals at any given time. Anyone who uses a browser owes them a debt of thanks (Thanks!) Again, if you disagree with one of those positions, and have an intelligent argument, I imagine that they would want to hear it. I complained to them when I disagreed, and got a thoughtful, intelligent and friendly response. Likewise, and in fairness, anyone who has contributed to Mozilla (I like many others just don't have the skills to do so) has my appreciation. It's my primary browser again (though the bookmark bugs are a threat to my sanity). Thanks! The Web is a spectacular tool for constructive discourse, but let's keep it constructive. That's what makes evolt a great forum instead of a sand box.

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