>PS. Seriously, should we, as a standards group,
>recognize the validity of producing NetScape
>tags? I can understand the browser-writers
>wanting to implement it, but I think it's not
>good policy for authoring standards.
I vote yes. The race has barely begun, but I think Netscape
already has it locked up on the server side (for a variety
of reasons that are inappropriate to expound upon here 8^).
If nothing else, their extensions represent a de facto
standard that will be hard to ignore, in the same way that
Win32 and OLE are "standards" that are hard to ignore.
But even if you disagree with my market analysis, what harm
is there in supporting their tags? None. And it's not _that_
much extra work.
OTOH, what harm is there in staying "pure" to the official
HTML spec? Plenty: Insufficient support for the most popular
and well-backed product in the category.
Ultimately, the market decides the standards. I think
Netscape is going to win this battle by the time the next
official HTML document gets produced. We NEXTSTEPers might
as well be ready for it.
greg