The Big Lizard - Gecko: A Smaller, Faster Lizard - HTML with Style

Gecko: A Smaller, Faster Lizard

The Big Lizard

Mozilla was Netscape's developers' pet name for Navigator in the earlier days, and also the name of Netscape's mascot, a green Godzilla-like creature that made up in charm what it lacked in sheer scare value compared to its city-devouring relative.

At the heart of Mozilla is NGLayout, what Gecko is all about. But there is more to Mozilla than just the layout engine. The people at Mozilla.org have created XPToolkit, formerly XPFE, the Cross-Platform Front-End, a user interface to Mozilla that is common across all platforms and can be dynamically modified by the author or user using a style sheet mechanism. Yes, this means you can change toolbars, menus, and other frills in a way consistent between platforms. Mozilla includes a Mail and News client derived from Netscape Messenger that can do really exciting stuff like mailing list management. Mozilla uses RDF, the Resource Definition Format, an XML application created at the W3C, for representing all of its meta-data. It also has an improved network library for accessing network resources, a graphics library for displaying graphics, a new JavaScript processor and GUI debugger, a Calendar application, an interface to use any Java Virtual Machine you like with Mozilla, better color matching, complete internationalization and localization, a Web page editor that is in line with the rest of Mozilla, and all the rest of the features you expect from a modern Web browsing application. As I said, Gecko is only the tip of the iceberg.

Mozilla is also being ported to a number of platforms. An important development here is the use of Gtk+ instead of Motif for the Unix ports, making the lizard even more free than it was before.

So the trend of smaller, faster and better is not confined to Gecko. Expect these characteristics to appear in Communicator 5.0, as they are appearing in Mozilla right now. Ending our little foray into Gecko's family tree, let's get to the meat of the thing: Gecko's HTML and CSS capabilities.

Produced by Stephanos Piperoglou

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URL: https://www.webreference.com/html/gecko/
Created: Dec 16, 1998
Revised: Dec 16, 1998