Internet Explorer and Standards. This is basically Microsoft telling developers that it can do whatever it wants. They seem to be saying “screw the standards.”
Despite the excellent information on user interface design that Joel Spolsky is publishing on the web, this line really pisses me off.
“If they go to the Font toolbar and replace the word “Times
New Roman” with the words “Insert Picture”, you’ve probably found a Linux Weenie who
doesn’t know about fonts and thinks that that box is a command line interface. Ignore him and
move on.”
You know, I was just joking around the other day when I told someone it wouldn’t be long before we started receiving cell phone spam.
Great, now I can furnish my new apartment.
There’s been a lot of talk about the decision the Mozilla team made to abandon native widgets (scroll bars, buttons, progress meters, dialog boxes, etc.) in Mozilla and Netscape 6. Many people are saying that this will work against Netscape. Despite my Mozilla involvement and the excitement I have for it, I think that they’re correct. The solution is for Mozilla (and Netscape) to either put native OS widgets back in or ship XBL sets with Mozilla that closely [or exactly] emulate the look, feel, and behaviors of the native OS widgets. This is not that difficult to do, but the development time might be tricky. I’m more worried about closely emulating the behaviors than anything else. Regardless, Mozilla is an amazing piece of software that is extremely extensible. I’m writing some articles on Mozilla that will be published shortly that explain just exactly what Mozilla can do and why it’s so powerful. Not surprisingly, most of the complaints come from the Mac users, and I don’t blame them one bit, as I’m also a big Mac UI fan. Porting Mozilla to the Mac natively would have been very difficult and expensive, and is one of the reasons the Mozilla team decided to use their own set of native widgets that look and behave the same across all platforms.
From my perspective, it shouldn’t matter whether Netscape 6 is a success in the consumer browser market or not. It’s more about Mozilla as an application platform, and the benefits it gives developers in their fight against Microsoft-technology-based web application development. Mozilla is completely standards-compliant and works exactly the same on more OS platforms right out of the box than any other web-enabled software in the world. Microsoft can put that in their IE 5.5 pipe and smoke it.
InformationWeek on Netscape 6.
Apple: Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines and MacOS 8 Human Interface Guidleines. [Valuable resource!]
BetaNews: Interview With the Mozilla Team
“Writing the project “in itself” is a cool idea, but not conducive to rapid development. If fast
development time was the goal we should have scrapped the XUL idea and used a stable toolkit to
build native browsers. That was what we did with Communicator, and the result was that Unix and Mac
development falls behind because we can’t justify spending 2/3rds of the front-end programming
budget on platforms that make upRichInStyle.com is a great resource for CSS information.
Some people shouldn’t be allowed to publish online. This rant about Mozilla is pretty clueless. When are people going to realize that Preview Release 1 does not mean beta! Mozilla and Netscape 6 a long way from beta folks.
Lots of great UI and design links at this new weblog called antenna. [Bookmark it.]
Posted by Cameron Barrett at April 11, 2000 06:55 PM