In this regard, netscape will eat itself.
:From: Leo@easynet.co.uk (Leo Scheiner)
:
:I have noticed that Netscape Navigator 2.0 will be released shortly together
:with Netscape Gold a home page WYSIWIG development environment incorporating
:all the Netscape enhanced extentions. That is pretty smart marketing. I have
:used several HTML editors most recently having spent $95 on Soft Quads
:HotMetal Pro 2.0 which gave me 2 days of irritation and frustration. I am
:still using a standard editor and frankly would gladly pay for a good HTML
:one that covers all the Netscape extentions.
God help us all. If some of the Netscape Enhanced pages out there are any
indication, then we're in for some borken stuff. If their WYSIWYG (which
is obviously another way of saying What You See Is What Netscape Renders)
is just a nice frontend for putting <blink> into your pages, then obviously
it'll be just wonderful way of writing pages just for Netscape.
I have further found that WYSIWYG as far as HTML goes is a bad concept.
In fact it goes against everything that HTML was built for. It's a
Mark Language, and if Ncomm wants to make it a presentation language,
then they should do so, and stop calling what they're doing HTML.
:With 70% or more of the market covered and with the best extentions around,
:I reckon Netscape is about to consolidate it's pre-eminent position. I have
:already been advising my customers to go for Netscape enhanced sites (on the
:grounds that a good homepage reaching 70% is better than a boring one
:getting to 100%) If anything they should offer a text based alternative.
And what exactly is boring about not having something centered? Not having
something blinking at you? Not haveing wasted bandwidth for background
images that usually make the presentation less appealing? Why would I be
board without those things? I'm generally not, and If I'm using netscape,
and I stumble accross a site with large background images that change
from page to page, I either don't waste my time, or fire up mosaic.
Ususally the former.
:Notwithstanding all those committees trying to design an agreed standard,
:Netscape will establish the real standard.
A proprietary standard (Netscape still hasn't released a true DTD for
their extensions, why? because they wouldn't fit in a DTD as they're
bad tags). So Netscape will have a proprietary standard. Since they've
demonstrated how poorly they write standards, it's not one I'd want to
get into. Now style sheets, something Netscape should have been working
on instead of writing bad extensions, are where to look in the future.
Oh, that's right, you have no truck with the committees. Pity because
that's how things are done on the Net, and there is a much bigger brain
trust behind those committees then Netscape could beg borrow or steal.
:That leaves an interesting question as to what Microsoft will do. On this
:occasion I suspect that not only are they too late but that any strategy to
[more elided]
Microsoft will do what microsoft does. Netscape is just a minature version
of it. Microsoft can easily beat Netscape at it's game. It'll just bundle
it's version with the most used desktop software around, or with a cheap
addon to it. But Microsoft has something that Netscape doesn't. Instead
of Microsoft having to bundle everything with it's browser, it'll just
use it's own software to do everything that Netscape promises with it's
next version.
Let us examine where Netscape is headed, shall we. You have PDF support,
okay. They're going to be doing Quicktime or Mpeg as well. HotJava,
VRML, throw a couple more things into the mix. Okay, now you have a
binary file that either comes on 10 diskettes, takes 3 hours to download,
or you get on a CD-ROM. This includes your handy dandy WYSIWNR authoring
tool as well. Heck, Netscape might as well just start writing the OS as
well, because their one browser will take up as much space.
Next, Netscape isn't playing nice with your local ISP's where most people
go to for their access to the Web. ISP's aren't happy about this (lisencing
terms, can't point at us, can't distribute on disk, have to buy at least
1,000 copies to legally redistribute). ISP's are looking at their other
options, including redistributable ones like UdiWWW, and better resale
terms, such as NetShark.
Next, when there is a standard, and everyone is jumping all over style
sheets, Netscape is going to have to play catch-up just like everyone
else. Style sheets make puny Netscape extensions look like what they are,
bad presentation extensions within a Markup Language. <Center> is bad
and unlikely that anyone else will support it, and yet it is everywhere
right now. <P ALIGN=CENTER> is good, is going to be in the standard
and is going to be support. Of course, all those people that learned
by example from other Netscape enhanced pages doubtfully look at
their pages with anything besides Netscape, won't know this of course,
and won't know what people are talking about when they tell them that
<CENTER> isn't a standard tag, and to use something else.
Next, you have an awful lot of people accessing the WWW from other types
of online service. There is no guarantee that they'll support N+HTML but
there is a guarantee that they'll at least support HTML 2.0 and 3.0 when
it's available.
Netscape has done the Net wrong with their extensions, and will most
likely continue to do so. What happens when you throw standards to the
wind? Something like Microsoft's PPP support and the nonstandard and
badly thought out extensions to PPP that the IETF said no to, but MS
went ahead with, much to the chagrin of a lot of System Administrators
the net over. Lets say that someone came out with a really nice mail
reader (I'm sure netscape will eventually do this as well) and decided
that POP, SMTP, and MIME just weren't nifty enough for it. It creates
it's own versions, but doesn't bother with any similar efforts brought
before the IETF. Well, so what if it breaks a lot of legacy software,
at least it's the most spffy mail reader out there, and it'll force
everyone to align to it's new standard anyway, eventually. Wrong way
to do stuff.
Besides, most people who know about standards see how poorly a Netscape
induced standard would be. The people that know more about writing good,
usable standards know far more about doing it then Marc, or his crew.
The last point, and the one that seems most used, and yet most ignored
is the old saw. If you can't get your point across without netscape
extensions, how many people are going to care about your point anyway?
Netscape extensions will be around for many years to come. They'll be
mostly relegated to the Internet Hall of Shame, along with Cantor
and Seigel, Jeff Slayton, Microsoft's PPP extensions, everyone that said
they're running a secure service, only later to have their customers'
find out that someone hacked into the services machine and used their
credit cards.
And, is everyone forgetting one of the biggest selling points of Netscape
in the beginning? Secure transactions via SSL. It's become pretty apparent
that RC4 isn't all that snazzy. RSA is, was, and most likely will
be for a while. Too bad every goverment in the world is too threatened
by strong crypto in the hands of their citizenry. We'd be a lot farther
toward online commerce with it.
Sorry for long post.
Matt
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-- Matt Marnell Portia Communication &amp; Internet Services CEO/CIO Inet Consulting, Training, Info Services marnellm@portia.com Web Authoring and Unix Consulting and Admin <a href="<a href="http://www.portia.com">http://www.portia.com</a>">http://www.portia.com</a> v: (513)435-6534 f: (513)435-6643
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