Pick One Standards Or A Browser

The founder of MozillaZine, Chris Nelson, has posted a rant in which he lashes out at 'third party micro-managing' for harming the Mozilla effort.

In the column, entitled "Netscape Cannot Win", Nelson criticises the likes of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), O'Reilly's David Flanagan, and Tim O'Reilly himself.

The WaSP ran a campaign to force Netscape to delay release to accommodate the new rendering engine NGLayout, with much support from the web developer community.

Flanagan recently wrote an article and started a petition demanding the further delay of Netscape 6 until further bugs are fixed.

Nelson's post raises an interesting issue for web developers: whether it is better to unconditionally support full web standards compliance, or settle for the release of a browser that may be becoming increasingly irrelevant as time passes.

Nelson has vowed to stop posting Netscape news on his site. "This crap will no longer will find a home in MozillaZine," he writes. "However, I allow myself an exception to clobber the hell out of the WSP if they continue to act like pussies."