43817 - [RFE] Support for non-standards (proprietary) HTML Extensions

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: DOM: HTML Parser, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Brian Staples]

Now I'm not proposing that we encourage the usage of non-standards HTML 
Extensions but many Web Developers have complained to me or on websites that 
Mozilla still needs to support proprietary HTML Extensions from Netscape and 
Microsoft because they are still in use and probably will be for a long time. So 
here is the proposed issue that Microsoft and Netscape Proprietary Extensions 
become supported in Mozilla because if Mozilla or Netscape 6 are to become 
viable alternatives to Internet Explorer then we need to support what Netscape 
currently supports and Internet Explorer supports even proprietary extensions. 
So I'm asking for support of these extensions. Thank you.

Comment 1

[Blake Ross]

->parser

mmm...I'm a little confused here.  Do you mean we should be backwards 
compatible and support things like layers?  This would be a lot of unnecessary 
work.  If you mean we should be supporting Microsoft's propietary languages and 
such (i.e. VBScript), well...i'm afraid we can't do that (hence, propietary) 
unless MS licenses it to us (afaik).

Can you explain a little more, please, what you mean by "HTML extensions" ?

Comment 2

[rickg]

We can't agree to a nebulous RFE; so please  give us concrete cases to consider.

Comment 3

[Dave]

Just out of curiosity, are layers deprecated or something?...

Comment 4

[Dave]

cc self

Comment 5

[Blake Ross]

They're not only deprecated, as of Mozilla 1.0 and NS6, they're dead.  Layers 
were netscape-only, but there are now much better and more standards-compliant 
ways of achieving the same effect that they had.  We're trying to encourage 
people to support these standards, and thus we're cutting off support for the 
old propietary layers.

Comment 6

[Brian Staples]

Ok, here is what I'm getting at things like IFRAMES and Layers are not standard
but need to be supported simply because Web Developers don't want to change the
way they code just because we cut them off by saying only standards compliant
tags can be used. I'm not saying support VBScript by any means. I'm just saying
popular proprietary tags need to be supported because no one wants to change the
way they code unless they can do something new. Then as more developers learn
the standards compliant ways of doing things you can phase them out later. We
have to look both short term and long term. Short Term says to support popular
proprietary tags and Long Term says to eventually phase them out. I hope this
clears things up. Thanks.

Comment 7

[Blake Ross]

Please don't set the milestone unless you're the engineer who's going to work 
on the problem.

I believe we support IFRAMES...I think supporting layers is entirely out of the 
question, but I'll let rick do what he wants w/ this rfe.

Comment 8

[Dave]

what are the standards complient alternatives to layers? The reason I asked
about them is because a friend recently asked me about them and I wasn't sure
what to tell him. Having never used them myself, I wasn't even sure what they
were :) I'm sure he'll gladly use the standards if he knows what they are.

I'm sure most web developers will also be glad to use the standards... if they
want their pages to display on most/all browsers, that is.

Comment 9

[Brian Staples]

After some serious considerations of the issue and everyone else's ideas you
have made me see the light of things and it would be sending a bad message don't
worry about using standards, no matter what. So I'm going to makre the RFE
closed and we
no longer have to worry about it. brista signing off. 

Comment 10

[Blake Ross]

Hi Brista,

   We only close bugs when the product ships.  Thanks.

Comment 11

[Blake Ross]

inv

Comment 12

[Blake Ross]

vrfy