It it inevitable that standards will change. CSS seems to be the big thing right now, but it may come and go. The best thing that Mozilla can do is remain modular enough that it will be easy to add support for the next standard, whatever that may be.

The nice thing about the standards is a write once run anyware ability. I've created a fully HTML4.0 CSS2 page that looks great (minus a few very minor bugs) under Mozilla. Every other browser except for the text-only version make it look ugly (Opera doesn't do too bad.)

The ability for me to set up a page that I can easily change the style layout, whatever is what I want most. I've built half of a database backed web page, and now I am writing the input section. My input page will rely on DOM to do much of the correctness checking so I can submit it straight to the database with no problems. The DOM works great for this, except for one bug in extracting the value from a for input.

Enough rambling. The best part about standards is that you can look in one place for all of the information you need. If I need to know how to change the colors of divs I go to w3.org; for proper syntax in HTML, w3.org; for moving my page to XHTML or XML, w3.org and for DOM methods, again, w3.org. Everything I need to know about writing whatever web application I want is within reach, rather than having to rummage through search engines trying to find the specs for IE's DOM or NS4's DOM or whatever. With a standards body, everything is exactly where I need it.

The problem with standards is they take so long to get finished, and they are designed by committee. The particular flaw with the W3 standards is that they come with no reference implementation. (Contrasted with IETF standards which usually have a decent implementation). Since there is no reference implementation, it is up to the browser makers to interpret the standards in edge cases the standards writers didn't even think of. The incompatibilities between CSS1 and CSS2 are an example of this. Particularly with font mapping (see the CSS2 notes for details). The W3C sits up on high and decrees commandments for authors and browsers to follow, but, does not do very much to help the browser makers or authors actually implement them.

This is changing a bit with the latest standards. CSS2 has some detailed discussion and pseudo code, as does parts of the DOM spec. But we need something like Amaya (or a version of Amaya which is stable and full featured) as a reference.

While mozilla's standards support is great, there are a few important standards that are still missing. Each of these is, in my opinion, vital to the future of the web, and I hope that serious work is begun on these as soon as possible after NS ship their first branded browser. I'd love to see an NS5.1 within a few months that added support for them.

In particular:

XHTML (shouldn't be too hard since it's basically HTML4.0 expressed as XML, but I think it's vital to follow it to the letter)

CSS2/CSS3 (CSS2 has been a w3c recommendation for quite some time now... partial support seemed good back when NS first promised it, but as time passes FULL support will be more and more important)

XSLT - Please! This is a biggie. This is a "killer feature" in the latest IEs (even though it doesn't fully support the standard) and it's a big area where IE can still boast better "standards support"

Real PNG alpha - don't know what happened to the bug on this, but it didn't seem to be considered a terribly high priority. I'd like to see this in 5.0.

MNG - the last barrier to getting rid of GIFs on the web. Browsers need to support this *soon*.

MathML - the support is almost completely written already it seems. I hope it will be included in the branded 5.0.

Remember, I love mozilla. I think it is taking a HUGE leap in the right direction. But I really hope that these other standards get incorporated sooner rather than later.

Stuart.

I think the W3C should be more open to outside input, using something like Bugzilla for people to suggest changes or new ideas.

I also think the term "Layer" is more intuitive than "Div" and standards bodies should consider things like that.

I think sdm is right about the reference implementations.

The specifications, for setting colors for the body of the document, confused me. It seems that 2-digit hexadecimal values (RRGGBB) are used for text and borders but 1-digit background colors (RGB) are used for the background. How is it possible to specify a 24-bit background color with 1-digit hexadecimals?

That the W3C is a very closed and secretive organisation is a common complaint, not to mention the costs of joining. I'm not too knowledgable about the actual W3C processes but in general I'd agree that an open system is preferable. But people have been complaining for years about the W3C and it shows no sign of changing, so I'd suggest that the only way to do something about it would be to set up another standards writing body to write standards in the same area. It's just occured to me that Mozilla might be a useful or even necessary part of such an effort.

I'm writing as the thoughts come to me at the moment so I apologise in advance if there are any gaping holes in my logic.

In order to create a new set of standards it would be necessary to overcome an enormous amount of inertia that is keeping people with the W3C's work. To do this there would need to be either some serious backing from one or more large companies, or a very good set of standards with a very good reference implementation. Since Mozilla already has an advanced rendering engine, the source code of which is accessible, it might be very useful for anyone wishing to create or experiment with proposed standards in this area. A proposed standard with a Mozilla based reference implementation would be far more impressive and far more likely to be adopted than just a proposed standard on its own.

Does that make any sense? Is there anything I've missed?

Mozilla is the most open browser project currently in development. Its newsgroups, website, daily builds, and bug reporting system make it the perfect candidate to be the "reference implementation" that the W3C needs sorely needs. Currently, developers have to battle with conflicting standards and vague wording in specifications. The CSS3 spec is currently in development, but there is no complete implementation of *CSS1* yet. The process chugs along, unwilling to stop to let the industry catch up.

Since the Mozilla development occurs in the open and crosses platform and operating system lines, it seems like it would be the ideal solution to this issue of the lack of a reference implementation. What do you think?

Our friends at CNET have this lovely article about Time/Warner/AOL/Netscape/we-own-everything's plans for netscape 6. Yes 6. They have decided to take the Micro$oft number game to the next level. Anyway, my two favorite lines from the article were 1.) "... the most notable difference is the way AOL said it will distribute the product. The company plans to allow Web sites to launch their own branded versions of the browser..." (no mention of the completely new code base, standards compliance, open source, etc.) 2.) "Until now, Netscape has relied partly on its open-source development organization, Mozilla.org, to speed development of its Communicator browser, with volunteers and paid developers refining the product. But despite Mozilla's efforts, AOL has acknowledged that it has been late in updating its browser technology." What do you mean, "until now"?!?! "partly" ?!?! <a href="http://technews.netscape.com/news/0-1005-200-1548169.html">read it for yourself</a>

Well as far as the standards "process" goes, I think its horrible. Now this isn't to say that the people that define the standards are unintelligent, but its that only x number of people are allowed to define them if they pay a huge sum of money and then the standards making process is entirely secretive. I mean come on, you'd think they were designing secret military weapons of mass destruction. And then the fact that almost ONLY big businesses have any outside influence. Now you can't tell me that all those businesses don't have all their secret and alterer motives to have the standards conform to whatever new product, etc, they are coming out with. And then I saw that they TradeMarked the word XHTML and I almost spit my pop all over my monitor. Now when the heck did the W3C think it became a big business... I can imagine 5 years down the road Bill Gates giving an anonymous sum of money to the W3C for ths new standard MSHTML.

But enough with the process... I believe the real root of the problem is that no one really understands the whole picture of the defined standards. And in fact i've seen quite a few acticles about some of the standards where its very visible that they don't know what they hell they are talking about either. Heck I don't even have anything close to a full understanding. Because lets see we have HTML4, XML, XSLT, X... (5+ more xStandards), DOM1, DOM2, CSS1, CSS2, CSS3 (which has a lot of "sub" standards) SMIL, MathML, WPL, and I figure I've missed 6+ more standards and that is just one huge mess. I mean then a developer also needs to know, asp, php, sql, javascript, vbscript, perl, and webserver configuration... And well my head's about to explode. Don't get me wrong I see a lot of power in the current standards and I believe there is probably a lot more power than any one has imagined.

But they define a standard behind closed doors then one day decide its a spec and then they throw it out to the public with few example and almost no reference for the implementation. And then phew Browser's makers and developers are expected to pick it up and use it like it was the best thing since sliced bread....

Anyway I'm rambling..., -DHTML Fiend

I'm encouraged by the helpful observations I've read here, and I find I agree with many of them, such as: W3C is overly secretive and puts up too high a barrier for membership to be considered truly open. But perhaps that reflects the excessively political and adversarial nature of the struggle for control over standards. The DOM situation in the version-5 browsers, while hardly perfect, still represents a significant advance in cross-browser scriptability.

Mozilla is clearly way ahead of Microsoft in implementing some of the DOM Level 2 Event stuff. My experience in writing browser-forks for DOM 2 events to compensate for Microsoft's neglect of Events shows me we're not out of the woods with our dueling DHTML woes.

The Webpage Author's "Bill of Rights": 1."The Webpage Will B Rendered by The Renderer, The Way The Webpage Was Orginally Written by The Webpage Author!"

An Compliance Should B Judged by The Ability of The Renderer (Mozilla?) 2 Render The Webpage Author's "Original" Mark-Up/Code as *IT* was Orginally Written by The Webpage Author, w/o Change!