Re: Netscape v NCSA, Progress?

Kee Hinckley ([email protected])
Mon, 17 Oct 94 22:28:51 -0400


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> Seriously though, I see a real danger here. By adding functionality in
> the absence of industry participation, MCC is driving the balkanization
> of web.

I am far less concerned with whether or not they did the right thing
than with how I'm going to support both styles of browsers. The
benefits of the extensions are hard to ignore, but I have no clean
way of telling whether a browser can support them.

This isn't a problem unique to Netscape. Table support in NCSA's
2.5 beta results in the same issue. In fact it's worse, a table
read in a browser without table support looks like trash. A
minimal solution would be to modify the web server to check for
the browser type and load an alternative file on the request.
(E.g. when asked for "foo.html" it might give "foo.ehtml" or some
such if the browser supported the extensions used in that file.)
I don't believe that's a good long-term solution, but it ought
to work for the short term.

Any thoughts?

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Kee Hinckley 617/721-4671
[email protected] http://www.utopia.com/home.html

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.

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