[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] [stds] browser war - starting over
YinSo Chen writes on the Web Standards Project (WSP) List: >I am not sure if an _independent_ developer will have _any chance in the >browser market right now. The browser war is all out, and anyone >participating better have a vastly deep pocket to compete. The browser war is indeed over, if you require that all browsers be bloated beasts that support everything an Internet user might want to do, from <BLINK> to email to news to JavaScript. If you don't, there may be hope, and it may be compatible with the goals of the WSP. A number of folks been talking on the XML-L list (archives at http://listserv.hea.ie/xml-l.html) about the possibility of creating a _small_ browser based around an XML parser and supporting CSS1 or a reasonable subset. Focusing on XML makes this _much_ easier - there's no need to waste processing cycles on broken markup. The structure can be built with a fairly minimal toolset, thanks to the much stricter rules XML places on documents. Implementing CSS in any significant way will, of course, require some hard work creating displays that accurately reflect the spec. While this doesn't achieve all the goals of the WSP, since this browser isn't going to support every weird dream that's currently possible in the HTML soup, it might provide an opportunity to show the major vendors that it's possible to build a browser right. XML + CSS is the easiest way to go for a lot of XML projects that are just getting started, and which have been hampered so far by the lack of browser support. IE5 has some XML support, but not a simple XML+CSS -> display XML, and Mozilla is still a long ways from completion. What I've got in mind is a simple Java HTTP engine + XML parser and a set of tools for other code to plug in and handle the display. Working in Java will enforce keeping this small, among other things. The DOM spec could provide a foundation for reading and manipulating the parsed XML, and Swing already provides a lot of the interface gizmos needed. Depending on how well the modularity is implemented, it might not be too hard to plug other things like JavaScript into the browser. It's not a perfect idea - Netscape and Microsoft probably won't lose sleep over it - but it seems like a good way to get things moving, especially in XML. Keeping it an open source project would make it easy for the maximum number of people to examine and fix the implementation. While implementing a subset of CSS won't necessarily make designers happy, it would probably be enough to get XML-based client apps rolling. If anyone's interested in writing up an initial spec for this or contributing programming time to it, please let me know. I've got too many non-paying projects already, and I'm not enough of a programmer to pull this off myself, but it seems like an idea whose time has come, and one I'd like to work on. Simon St.Laurent Dynamic HTML: A Primer / XML: A Primer Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth (November) xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|