My original comment was made in reply to ".... so perhaps we can encourage a project to develop an open source browser that supports XML, plugins, java, javascript?" I was simply pointing out that someone was already working on reinventing the wheel and there was no need for everyone to go into headless chicken mode just because Redmond would like to "encourage" us all to use their pet technologies. The following is from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/ __________________________________________________________________________ The Future SVG support in Mozilla will be beneficial for both Mozilla and SVG. SVG is poised to become one of the most useful and fun Web technologies around. An open-source platform-independent SVG renderer ensures that the standard is kept clean and well-implemented. Help us out! __________________________________________________________________________ Much of this applies equally well to many other web based technologies. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ for a full list of current projects associated with Mozilla. The following clip from this page is pertinent to many of the comments which Henry makes below. "The primary mission of mozilla.org is to coordinate and integrate the work of others." So if there are holes then offer to "plug them" :-). Rick On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Rzepa, Henry wrote:

...

I stand to be corrected but doesn't Mozilla do all of these things? I strongly encourage all to support the Mozilla project - the more that do the less the likelihood that M$ will ultimately set the whole web agenda.

http://www.mozilla.org/

The Mozilla project is opensource in the sense that many separate developers appear to be contributing code to it.

Thus http://www.croczilla.com/svg seems to be the main thrust towards SVG (but this by a single person, who does it in their "spare time"). As I have noted at this forum previously, this offers one interesting way forward for rendering chemistry from well specified data structures.

But Netscape/Mozilla seems to be developing with lots of what one might call omissions, or holes, in their features. On another forum for example, the lack of LDAP support was commented on, implementation of which again seems to be coming from one particular group in the opensource effort. I have a particular interest in the use of X.509 certificates to authenticate, support for which was excellent in Netscape 4.7, but only about 50% there in Netscape 6.1 (remember, 6.1 is supposed to be a full release, not a beta, and is not supposed therefore to have features missing).

The message that strongly comes over is that one must design things such that the data, the logic and the rendering are kept quite separate. This of course makes it particularly tricky to design "friendly" sites where lots of JavaScript and other content/logic/rendering is often used to create a usable interface. Think of the amount of javascript (of unknown standard or specification) in sites such as the NCI or Protein Explorer databases. Most sites also have a great deal of "CGI" hidden server side processing going on. Once that server-side resource stops (or its domain is purchased!) then all the data and content it represented is lost! In that sense, we are back to where we were in 1993, pre-web.

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