Gripezilla
So, y'know, I'm a big fan of <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/">Mozillur</a>, and have been since forever and ever. And I'm a big fan of Web Standards, and I think it's pretty cool that Mozillur handles Web standards so well. I mean, fuX0r, about time and all.
But I also think there are some pretty crucial Web standards that Mozilla ignores or handles poorly, and that it needs to do better.
<ul> <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/">SMIL</a>. That's the integrated multimedia language, the W3C's answer to stupid MacroMedia Flash. It's been a W3C rec since 1998, but it's only been implemented in stupid RealPlayer and such. Why? Mozillur has this great infrastructure for downloading and displaying XML files like all getout. Why not SMIL? Why do I still have to look at puzzle-pieces in this day and age? Why are proprietary plugins still on the Web in 2004?</li> <li><a href="http://www.w3c.org/Graphics/SVG/">Scalable Vector Graphics</a>. Another great example of a well-defined W3C standard poorly executed. This one is for vector graphics, which is pretty damn cool, since they can be automated/animated with DOM, and you can put links in, and all kinds of stuff like that. Mozillur has SVG support in it, but it's based on some hacked up libraries, and it messes up all kinds of other things -- it'll crash Gnome, for example. So everybody turns it off. Why not fix it? There's quite a few SVG libraries out there, so why not use them?</li> <li><a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/fonts.html#font-descriptions">Dynamic Web Fonts</a>. So, when Navigator became Mozilla, they stripped out the BitStream InstoFont Dynamic Web FontX0r technology, so it could all be Free Software and stuff. Which, like, fine, but nobody's bothered to go back in and re-implement dynamic Web fonts. It's part of the CSS spec, so it'd be nice to support it. Why not? C'mon.</li> </ul>
ANYWAYS, dumb things to think about this Monday morning.