I opened a mail buffer at least four times to set the record
straight from the W3C-side... but couldn't send the message. There
were a lot of reasons that Netscape did what they did -- divulged
in confidence; unfortunately I cannot share -- and there were a
lot of excuses too. What matters at the end of the day is what
actions they finally took, regardless of intention. One can always
be a good guy at heart and do bad things. This is not to slam NS
or Lou; they were not the only ones who thought that they could
get away with a "do it our way, or do it our way" attitude.
Ah, JSSS: the trigger for the now wildly popular Submission
process.
- S
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
To: fork@xent.ics.uci.edu <fork@xent.ics.uci.edu>
Date: Saturday, June 26, 1999 12:53 AM
Subject: JSSS
>Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
>>netscape will go one
>>better [??] with JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS) [this project is
dead as far
>>as I can tell], a JavaScript-programmable superset of CSS, but
not until
>>Navigator 4.0."
> -- http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/jun99/0357.html
>
>Oh no, it's very real. Turn off javascript in your NS4 browser
>and notice that CSS stops working too.
>
>I visited Netscape to talk to Lou about this... let's
>see... Aug 1996, according to my records.
>
>Back then, he represented Netscape in the HTML WG, and
>there was a lot of shooting the messenger going on.
>He said he hated those meeting so much it made him physically
sick.
>
>But one night, he had had a late night epiphany that CSS could be
>implemented by translation to javascript internally.
>
>To this day, I wonder whether it was wise to encourage him
>to do that, or if *no* CSS support in NS4 would have been
>better than the buggy support that was originally released,
>driving a dagger nearly through the heart of CSS.
>
>In case you're interested...
>
>JavaScript-Based Style Sheets [JSSS]
> Netscape Communications Corporation, 7 October 1996
> W3C Contact: Dan Connolly
>http://www.w3.org/Submission/1996/1/
>
>
>--
>Dan Connolly, W3C
>http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
>