Gecko: A Smaller, Faster Lizard
A Lizard that Does HyperText
|
| ||||
| ||||
|
|
HTML support has been woeful in most browsers up to now. My article, HTML 4.0 in Netscape and Explorer, tried to catalog the differences between the specification and the two major implementations. As expected, it's a long piece, and it even skips one or two areas as too complicated.
Gecko is far beyond that point in many respects. First of all, it supports a lot more of HTML 4.0. And second, it doesn't choke on proper HTML 4.0. It's difficult to catalog all of Gecko's capabilities since little documentation exists about it, and short of browsing the source there's little to tell you what is supported and what isn't. But this isn't the point. The point is to show some of the progress that has been made thus far. New HTML and CSS features are being implemented in NGLayout every day. It is a good bet that by the time the 5.0 release hits, most of HTML 4.0 will be implemented. Let's look at a few of the features implemented in Gecko:
HTML 4.0 Forms are all there in Gecko. It supports the BUTTON element that creates button with HTML content. It supports the FIELDSET element and the LABEL element, that enable you to organize forms in sections and also give controls labels. Yes, this means that now a user can click on the label to select a checkbox. One of Gecko's in-built demos illustrates this functionality:
Gecko with HTML 4.0 Form Elements
Gecko also supports the use of CSS style on form controls, which
means you can make your forms look the way you want. This and the
availability of BUTTON will probably make a lot of people
currently using <INPUT TYPE=image>
happy. Here is another screenshot:
Form Elements with Style
NGLayout is also slowly developing support for OBJECT, but this was disabled for the Gecko release because it's still a bit buggy. Numerous other tweaks have been made (the infamous paragraph-line break bug, that has been around for ages, has been finally removed). The only two things that I saw prominently missing are support for the LINK element in the document head and the OPTGROUP element in forms.
