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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Keith Hankin who wrote (21506)	11/17/1998 4:18:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>>Since the source is available for you to hack, you could add the new tag. As far as making it a standard, good luck. <<< You seem to have misunderstood my point completely. You seem to be dealing with this question from the POV that I am asking as a programmer for a solution to transparency. Moreover, you seem to be under the impression that a custom solution would do some good. I originally said something like - I wish Netscape or MSFT would talk to an artist or designer once in a while. A person doing a web site is not interested in custom solutions that won't work for most or even many browsers. They want to do designs and art and have them work for the customers. What you want to remember here is that the primary relationship for web sites is between the organization1:designer/content-producer and the organization2/individual2:person-using-the-internet. To the extent that programmers are constantly inserted into that relationship it is clumsy and awkward and from a business POV nearly unusable. Now designers and artists use jpeg files on the internet because all browsers now support them. They don't have to write custom tags and then send somebody plugins to display jpegs. This is the reason that so few custom media types have really taken off - if Netscape doesn't support it directly, it's too much trouble. And until Java starts to work well for media, that will continue to be the case. Nearly every little company hoping to the contrary, with the exception of Real and a few others, is hoping in vain. Netscape and MSFT have us all by the ****. But this example is far more complex than a single media type. I am talking about the relative paucity and poor performance of features that must work across all media types. Unless a feature, e.g. transparency, is implemented across all media types in a standard fashion, from the POV of the designer it is useless, worse than useless, counterproductive. I could try to rewrite the rendering of all types. In doing so for all practical purposes I would have replaced a substantial portion of Netscape. I might as well create my own browser, and then try to sell it against the big 2 in the business. Suicide, and a chore too large for one well-funded person, never mind one volunteer whose efforts in the end would financially only reward Netscape, not himself. The appropriate organizational strategy for features that reach across media types is for Netscape to coordinate them. Now after having watched the Java debacle unfold I don't have much confidence in Netscape to do that. Truth to tell, MSFT and IBM are better at that kind of job, though if they do it I no doubt will somehow rue the day I suggested it. One more time: There are features, transparency being one, that one needs to have globally implemented in an authoring/presentation environment. You only need to look at products like Quark XPress to see what I mean. The support at this point for this kind of flexible global design feature (ad hoc defintion: whatever you are doing, the way it works to do that is... (You know, like using a GUI)) in Netscape and IE is terrible compared to what designers are used to working with. There are no layers. The text support is crap: Bad/few fonts. No rotation, no transparency, no warping, no flexible column wrapping, no flexible injection of media that are also wrappable in a useful way, no flexible interspersal of different types. Lousy printing interface. This is saying a lot, since the Web is still mostly text. Take a look at a magazine sometime and compare to a web page. It has been too many years now for this primitivism to still be excused. Web designers who refuse to compromise the look of the art are forced to render in other packages and then put the whole affeir into a graphic, which is slow, slow, slow.. Not only that, but you lose the flexibility of text. And appropriate sizing for most users. There are lots of other features artists and designers need technically. For one, you need easy determination of the screen res/browser window size being used and flexible branching on that data so that you can select different sizes of graphics and fonts appropriately, especially if you have done something custom to the to avoid the crappy web page look you get with the defaults. These issues belong to the central program designers and standards setters. They belong to Netscape. Making Netscape open code does not remove this liability from you. You may perhaps even not need some of your programmers now that the world is helping out (for free.) But you certainly should be hiring some architects, standards experts, designers, artists who can communicate with programmers and client designers alike. Netscapes role is pivotal, and the small issue I originally raised is only one place where that pivotal design responsibility is getting very short shrift indeed. If MSFT sees this and can do something about it they can blow you away with legitimate tactics*, simply by being the responsible center for coordinating requests for and work on and design of and standards for global features and coherency of the design environment. IBM is also very good at that, in fact would be perfect for the task. Look out. Cheers, Chaz