Web Standards Meets Open Source?

Posted by Mario T. Lanza on September 29, 2004, 11:57 pm

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I have been authoring web sites for several years now and recently
come to value web standards (as touted by Zeldman and many other web
gurus). I have noticed with frustration that there are so many hacks
(tricks to take advantage of browser buggy-ness) and special rules to
be remembered in order to make sure that any one page displays
properly in the many popular browsers.

This leads me to...

Since the many programmers authoring their own browsers (IE, Firefox,
Mozilla, Opera, Safari, etc.) ultimately have to implement the same
W3C specs, why don't they all work together to develop one engine/DOM
for rendering web content and share it?

The browsers, could simply be differentiated by the
features/interfaces they offer. Wouldn't this shared effort result in
making the web a better place for every one -- both the users and
designers?

Am I missing something?

Sincerely,
Mario T. Lanza
Clarity Information Architecture, Inc.
2004.09

Posted by Leif K-Brooks on September 30, 2004, 6:34 am

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Mario T. Lanza wrote:
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All of today's rendering engines -- Gecko, KHTML, Presto, MSIE, Tasman,
etc. -- were created for what were perfectly sane reasons at the time.
You're right that it would probably make sense to merge them now, but
that would mean abandoning lots of code people have worked hard on, not
to mention the effort it would take to get it all working right. And
that's even assuming it's possible to get all of the browser projects to
work together, which seems a little far-fetched.

However, some merging does happen: Safari uses KHTML, an open-source
rendering engine created by the KDE project; Mozilla and Firefox share
the Gecko rendering engine; and WYSIWYG editors like GoLive and
Dreamweaver license Opera's Presto rendering engine for previewing web
pages. Even IE's proprietary rendering engine can be embedded in other
browsers with ActiveX without paying.

Posted by Mario T. Lanza on September 30, 2004, 9:41 am

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Yes, I realize that there is a great deal in the sharing of rendering
engines between certain product. Despite this, there are still
several engines and web developers must still go through the arduous
process of viewing their pages in several browsers to make sure all is
well.

Don't ask me why Star Trek: The Next Generation keeps coming to mind
-- I haven't watched it in years -- but I keep thinking how great it
would be if humanity (despite it's desire to compete in this
capitalistic world) would come together in some areas to work toward
the good of all. Yes, a little idealistic... but still I hope.

It just seems that web developers have to spend countless hours and
learn countless hacks if only to make websites available to the world.
Why should so many have to struggle to learn and solve the same
problems? The real blessing would be to have all web developers work
on their content and business solutions rather than browser hacks.

Long live web standards!

Mario

Posted by DU on September 30, 2004, 9:00 pm

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Mario T. Lanza wrote:

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The MSIE 7 dev. team has a blog site and some people requested that MSIE
just adopt Gecko as their new HTML engine. It's not that a crazy idea,
after all, not that far fetched..

DU
--
The site said to use Internet Explorer 5 or better... so I switched to
Mozilla 1.7.3 :)

Posted by Mark Parnell on October 1, 2004, 10:48 am

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declared in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:

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How else are we going to make money? If all browsers rendered everything
the same, anyone could do it!

--
Mark Parnell
http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au