Actually Gecko supports many IE proprietary extensions, among them offsetWidth and offsetHeight, innerHTML, and the "contextmenu" event. That aside, trying to paint this as some sort of standards compliance issue is inaccurate IMO.
Auto-fetching favicon.ico has nothing to do with Web page standards. It's a browser behavior, not a Web page or layout engine behavior, and how a browser behaves is completely up to the browser designer. dave ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aaron Andersen wrote: > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > Subject: > > Re: Automatic favicon.ico requests > From: > > Aaron Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: > > Mon, 07 Jan 2002 20:00:12 -0700 > > Newsgroups: > > netscape.public.mozilla.general > > > Peter Trudelle wrote: > >> Aaron Andersen wrote: >> >>> What, if anything, can those of us who thoroughly hate this feature, >>> do to get it removed? >> >> >> First off, what is the real problem? Why do you thoroughly hate it? > > > > Now I wasn't around when all this took place, so correct me if I'm > wrong, but this is history as I understand it. > > Sometime in the spring of 1998 what was then Netscape Communications > Corporation made the historic decision to release their browser under > open source, and to create the Mozilla Organization to develop it. This > decision was undoubtably discussed in detail amongst the Netscape execs, > with the pros and cons of doing such an unprecedented thing carefully > weighed. Among the pros was the potential to attract outside developers > to the project, and the possibility of this resulting in better, faster > development of a better, faster browser. Among the cons was the fact > that once the code was under an open source licence the browser would no > longer be under direct Netscape control; there would be features > incorporated into Mozilla that Netscape didn't want, and features not > incorporated into Mozilla that Netscape did want. This issue was > partially resolved through Netscape maintaining a separate tree of > overlays and such that did the things required to make Mozilla into > Netscape, such as removing IRC and adding AIM. In the end, it was > decided to go ahead with the open sourcing plan, mozilla.org was created > and this all began. > > At that time Microsoft had a web browser that was sort of standards > compliant, but was missing some things, and was full of proprietary, IE > only tags and extensions, like <marquee> and "document.all". Netscape > had a browser that was sort of standards compliant but was missing a lot > of things, and had a bunch of proprietary, Netscape only tags and > things, like <layer>. > > After a few months of hacking away at Netscapes 4.x code trying to turn > in into 5.x code, it was decided to totally scrap the 4.x code and start > over with what would eventually become Netscape 6.x. Exactly when the > new Gecko rendering engine was written I do not know, but one thing is > certain: it was decided that Gecko would support neither the nonstandard > IE extensions nor the nonstandard Netscape 4.x ones. By doing so, we > did not support "document.all". People would continue to write code > that used document.all. People would file bugs complaining that > document.all didn't work in mozilla. And every time we would politely > tell them that we weren't going to support document.all because it is a > nonstandard proprietary extension, and mark their bugs as WONTFIX. > Similarly,.we also dropped support for Netscape 4.x's <layer> tag. > People wrote pages with <layer> in them. Lots of people. People even > had javascripts that detected when a Netscape browser was present and > delivered pages containing <layer> tags. And yet we stuck to our > original goals and WONTFIXed all the bugs asking for <layer> support. > > Two years later, on March 16, 2000 someone filed a bug asking mozilla to > support the nonstandard proprietary extension known as favicon.ico. The > first four people to comment on this bug all suggested that mozilla only > support the standards compliant way of doing this, by using a <link> tag > or http header to specify that a page had a site icon. That way, people > who wanted a site icon could easily add one, but people who didn't > wouldn't get their servers pounded with requests for a file that didn't > exist and their errors logs filled up with 404s. After all, that was > what we had been doing all along when there was a standards compliant > way of doing something and an IE way, so why should this by any > different? The bug lay dormant for a while, but about a year and a half > later word got out that a fix was nearing completion and we started > discussing it on the newsgroups. In each case, all of the webmasters > and the majority of the nonwebmasters agreed that automatic favicon > fetching was not a good idea. Somehow, over the strong objections of > many people, it was checked in and turned on in 0.9.7. > > When I complain about the number of people who hate this "feature" and > am told that lost of people like it too. But lots of people liked > <layer> and lots of people like document.all. We don't support them, so > why this? Can someone explain to my what makes favicon so special? The > only difference I can see is that neither document.all nor <layer> > wasted the bandwidth or flooded the error logs of innocent webmasters > who either don't know about them or don't want to use them. Automatic > favicon fetching does. And it's extremely annoying, not standards > compliant, and just plain wrong. We shouldn't be doing that. A long > time ago it was decided that robots would be allowed to automatically > ask for robots.txt everywhere they went, so that they didn't end up > where they weren't welcome. But that doesn't give Microsoft the right > to just make up new such files at will, nor does it give us the right to > copy them. > > This post is too long already, so I won't even get into the whole "your > voice as a community member means nothing; if you want any influence you > have to be a paying customer" philosophy that has surfaced during all of > this. But I hope that somewhat answers the question, "Why do you hate > it so much?" that has been asked a lot lately. Of course I could go on > for another few pages if you want me to explain it more. > > > Aaron Andersen > www.xulplanet.com >
