Absolutely. Which is why we are and will be openly publishing all
new protocols, formats, interfaces, etc. that we happen to develop
in order to satisfy customer demands for new functionality that can't
be addressed with existing protocols/formats/interfaces, and which is
why we're bending over backwards to be fully interoperable with existing
implementations on both the client and server side.
This is reassuring, but I'm not sure it goes to the heart of the
objections I've heard to the way the Mozilla extensions to HTML have
been handled.
It would go a long way toward answering those objections if you had
put MozHTML up for public review a month or two ago, and listened to
the comments, rather than releasing it in apparently final form with
no review. CGI, for one thing, was handled this way, and I think it
wound up better for the public comment on the initial draft.
Interoperability
is obviously the lynchpin of this whole environment, and in everyone's
best interest.
...and, to finish the thought, fragmentation isn't in *anyone's* best
interest. All the more reason to seek early comment, so at least you
know if there are legitimate needs in some corner of the Web which
could be better handled with an easy change someplace, and which would
drive someone out of the tent if they aren't fulfilled.
I don't mean to disparage the ideas themselves, of course --- for the
most part, they're well thought out, and some of them are long
overdue. In fact, as long as you're hacking presentation hints
anyway, I would have liked to see support for something like
<ul type="inline-image" src="/icons/redball.gif">
<li> some stuff
<li> more stuff
<li> red ball image in front of each item
</ul>
to allow the image-bulleted lists which are showing up everyplace to
be marked up as *lists*, so that authoring systems and text-mode
browsers would have a prayer of handling them intelligently. I just
think this all could have been handled better politically.
Cheers,
Marc
--
Marc Andreessen
Mosaic Communications Corporation
Mountain View, CA
marca@mcom.com
All the best,
rst