Gervase Markham wrote:
> Standards Support
> -----------------
[ This section is taken from a post I've had partially written for a few
weeks, but didn't (until now) bother to finish. ]
The Mozilla 1.0 definition document [1] doesn't say much on standards
compliance, and if we plan to reach 1.0 sometime soon we'd better flesh
that bit out at some point. Ian Hickson has been using the [Hixie-Pn]
markers for n in {B,1,2,3,4,5,F} to prioritize some of the bugs, but
he's only looking at some areas, and we need to have a more general
discussion about what standards compliance levels should be required for
Mozilla 1.0.
A quick outline of the issues I see is the following (feel free to point
out any obvious or not-so-obvious omissions):
* Netscape marketing, early on, pledged support for CSS1, DOM1, and
HTML4, and people are going to want Mozilla 1.0 to meet that promise.
People are also going to expect Mozilla 1.0 to fully support HTTP
1.0, IMAP, POP, SMTP, PNG, GIF, JPEG, and perhaps other image
formats. We're doing pretty well with CSS1 and DOM1, although there
are some significant (although not huge) issues left, such as gamma
correction (this also affects the images) and block vertical margins
in CSS1 and null-ness of strings in DOM1. There are also a bunch of
minor issues. HTML4 is a whole other story. My understanding of
what was promised and what people will expect is that we have "full
support" for HTML4, not just conformance. (I think my desk is a
conformant HTML4 user agent, since if I tap two documents on my desk
in morse code that are SGML representations of the same document
tree, my desk won't react differently in any perceivable
(macroscopic) way. I'd have to double-check on that with the spec's
conformance requirements, though.) If we want full HTML4 support, we
need to push hard to get things like bug 2800 and bug 6782. There
are probably a bunch of other things we would need to add as well. I
really can't speak for images, mail, or networking.
* The next level of standards has the standards web developers care
about a bit but not as much, are DOM2, CSS2 (some parts more than
others), the XML family of standards (including XHTML), HTTP 1.1, and
RDF. [Ian also suggests that IPv6, SSL, HTTP Digest Auth and related
RFCs, the various multipart/* formats, etc. should be included in
this category.] We have partial support for all of these. That's
probably OK for most of them, but we need to be sure that what we
have isn't buggy. Much of it may not have been thoroughly tested
(e.g., DOM2).
* The next level of standards has the ones people like me really
don't think about much (could somebody else think of some of these?)
and the ones that are still being developed (such as what we've
implemented of CSS3 and DOM3 and our work in progress for SVG and
P3P). We still need to test our support for these to make sure it's
correct.
* A final issue that's somewhat related to standards-compliance is how
our own proprietary languages, like XUL and XBL, interact with
standardized languages such as CSS and HTML. This may come back to
haunt us, especially if we try to standardize these languages.
Depending on the community's definition of acceptable standards
compliance, standards compliance could be a major issue that holds up
the "declaration" of 1.0. We need to discuss what our criteria should
be for different standards and then get to looking at the bug lists and
making sure that the appropriate testing has been done.
> This is a key area where a 1.0 buglist needs to be made ASAP by our
> standards gurus. For each of the above areas, we need a nominated
"the > buck stops here" person who makes the final decision on a per-bug
> basis. (I assume this would normally be the module owner.) It would
> be very good to see cycles officially dedicated to the task of
> creating this list, and for each module to publish either the list or
> a Bugzilla query capable of making it (all bugs targetted at 1.0 or
> before?)
Creating a 1.0 buglist isn't possible for all of these areas, since some
of them have had little or no organized testing.
-David (speaking only for myself)
[1] http://mozilla.org/roadmap/mozilla-1.0.html
--
L. David Baron <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
