Anyone still not reading David Hyatt’s Blog should start doing so ASAP. If you read this blog, and find anything relevant, you will most definitely find his relevant. He’s a browser guru with his hand in many things. A definite site to bookmark. A few comments on this whole Safari/Dashboard thing…
Personally, I wish it were done in XUL, and XUL were fully implemented on Mac OS X via Web Kit. Would have been really neat. Personally I find XUL based interfaces to feel quite natural at this point. Even Mac OS X’s Firefox is feeling good. With Apple’s concentration it would have been great. But they did go with the second best (and still good) option of HTML, with lots of standards support. And that’s still a good solution, though not my personal favorite.
I’d also like to make note of a good quote here:
We have a phrase we like to use here on the Safari team, and that’s “real-world standards compliance.” What that means is that where possible we attempt to be fully compatible with the W3C standards, but we also want to support the real-world standards, i.e., extensions that for better or worse have become de facto standards. If you really do believe we should not have implemented contenteditable, then you are simply out of touch with reality.
Hyatt does say something that makes me feel really comfortable with Apple’s approach on standards:
finally we have submitted all of our extensions to the WHAT-WG for review. The slider in particular is already in the Web Forms draft. It is our hope that these HTML extensions will ultimately be standardized by a working group, but I wanted to emphasize that we are working with other browser vendors such as Opera and Mozilla to ensure that these extensions are implementable in those browsers and that these extensions can be standardized. We are not simply off “doing our own thing.”
This I’d really like to see happen. I’d ideally like to see these things work on multiple browsers, just like the new plugin system coming around. Perhaps Mozilla can be setup to allow these new Widgets to work? Would be nice to see Apple, Mozilla team up.
Lastly, regarding namespace…
Webkit is looking to use:
http://www.apple.com/2004/xhtml-extended/
IBM adapts HTML and uses:
http://www.ibm.com/data/dtd/v11/ibmxhtml1-transitional.dtd
I kind of perfer the /dtd/ and have a documented DTD available, so my ideal solution would be:
http://www.apple.com/dtd/1.0/xhtml-extended.dtd/
holding the format dtd/version/item.
Just my $0.02.