Netscape Communications Corp must have worked overtime to do it, but the company found a way to market its reaction to the Web Standards Project (CI No 3,526) as a win. On Tuesday the company unveiled its Next Generation Technology (NGT), a piece of software better known to its developers as NGLayout. This is a replacement for Navigator’s venerable layout engine. Crucially, it supports the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s standards, especially cascading style sheets (CSS) 1.0 and the document object model (DOM). In August, when it began to appear unlikely that NGLayout would be ready in time for inclusion in Navigator 5, web content producers formed the Web Standards Project (WSP, http://www.webstandards.org/). Arguing that today’s lack of standards compliance needlessly hikes the cost of developing content, the WSP exists to pressure both Microsoft and Netscape to provide better support for CSS, DOM and other W3C standards. By the end of October, the open-source Mozilla project on which the next generation of Navigator will be based had shifted its attention to NGLayout. Netscape indicated to the WSP that it would do the same. Tuesday’s announcement merely confirms this is a fait accompli. Still, if it works, NGT could be the most significant victory yet for the open-source model Netscape adopted when it released Navigator to the Mozilla project. Netscape promises that NGT will support HTML 4, the resource description framework (RDF) and XML as well as CSS and DOM. Besides the layout engine, Netscape says NGT will provide the means to build new application user interfaces, simplifying deployment across multiple platforms. Most importantly, NGT’s small footprint could make Netscape a supplier of browsers to the devices and information appliances that are now widely recognized as the next important market for internet software.
