July 16, 2000 - Netscape 6's Overview | WebReference

July 16, 2000 - Netscape 6's Overview

Yehuda Shiran July 16, 2000
Netscape 6's Overview
Tips: July 2000

Yehuda Shiran, Ph.D.
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Netscape has recently announced the availability of Netscape 6's beta version. This browser is based on Netscape Gecko, the platform-independent open-source browsing engine. Netscape claims that Netscape 6 is the world's first fully standard-compliant browser across platforms. They also believe that the ease of embedding Netscape Gecko will bring the same power to desktop applications as well as consumer and other low-cost devices.

Netscape 6 features full support for HTML 4.0, XML 1.0, Resource Description Framework (RDF), Cascading Style Sheets level 1 (CSS1), and the Document Object Model level 1 (DOM1). Netscape 6 provides partial (they claim the best) support for XML Namespaces, Cascading Style Sheets level 2 (CSS2), and the Document Object Model level 2 (DOM2). It also support the popular data transport protocols (HTTP, FTP, and SSL), multilingual character data (Unicode), graphics (GIF, JPEG, PNG, and XBM) and, most importantly, JavaScript 1.5.

Netscape claims that Netscape 6 beats Internet Explorer in six out of six most important races: support for standards, cross-platform, support for DOM, multi OS, multi-hardware, and open source. In upcoming months we'll dedicate several tips to Netscape 6 and we'll report how Netscape 6 stands up to its expectations.