Re: "bau-zahs"

Wilfredo Sanchez (tritan@dill.lcs.mit.edu)
Sun, 26 Mar 1995 16:03:13 +0500


Hey guys, while it's great fun to bash on Netscape's proposed
extentions, discussions about whether to call them "bowsers" and
"HTML-" and the like really aren't helping any.

While some of the Netscape extentions are pretty... well not in line
with what HTML is supposed to be, such as my favorite nit, <blink>,
having extra features doesn't hurt the effort so much as not
supporting features which are important. For example, last I checked,
neither Netscape nor Mosaic handle &nbsp; correctly. It would be real
nice of they did. I'd really like to put non breaking space in my
docs, but I can't yet without it looking stupid and in the meantime
I'm making docs that will take forever to fix later.

Some of the proposed Netscape extentions are quite useful and are
going to become standard. HTML 3.0, for example allows you to tile a
bitmap onto the background. Netscape added the ability to just specify
a color, rather than sending a bitmap with anoly that color. This
saves a connection and some time, and is probably a good idea.

It's better, I think, to flame about what a browser can't do right,
rather than whatever else it can do but we don't care to use, and
consider some of the ideas presented by the browser providers in due
course. Some are good, some aren't. Name calling doesn't tell me
anything useful.

-Fred
tritan@agora.com
Agora Technnology Group, Inc.