[Zarafa]

Originally posted by Ken at Omni:

I'll be the first to celebrate the day the entire web becomes standards-compliant, but until then it's our job to display (as authors intended) as much of the web as we possibly can.

Ken, would it be possible to at least do something similar to what MacIE does with regard to HTML/CSS standards and such -- if an author specifically makes a DOCTYPE declaration that states their page is HTML 4.01 Strict (for example), then only those entities, attributes and such allowed in that HTML version would be supported? That way emulation of older quirks could be supported for those pages which are NOT specifically tagged as being of a certain level.

Kudos on working despite the snow in Seattle today, by the way -- I was half-tempted to take the day off myself to ski or something. (I live about 10-12 blocks from the Omni offices.)

[eevyl]

To the Omniweb developers:

If you want to hit the jackpot in Spain, release a localized Spanish version of Omniweb with Mac OS X Final. A lot (and when I mean a lot I mean almost everyone) Apple users in Spain surf the web with IE just because is the only one that is localized in Spanish.

I can suppose that the same thing is also happening in others countries like France, Italy, Portugal, etc.

[clebin]

Regarding language support, it would be even better if there were language plists inside the packages so users could add their language if it isn't supported. You could submit these files back to Omni or whoever for them to make available for download. Opera has teamed up with a language organisation to support Celtic languages such as Welsh/Cymraeg, Gaelic and Scots Gaelic - but the future is surely for these users to edit a file, replacing 'file' for 'ffeil' for instance.

Thanks for your answers Ken - I think Omni's humble, level-headed approach to standards compliance is excellent. I don't have any more questions for now, so I'll just wish you well for the launch.

Chris

[Ken at Omni]

Originally posted by King Kong:
Shouldn't this be in the font preferences? Also shouldn't the restart requirement be noted in a dialog.

I agree: it's not in the best place, and perhaps we should note the restart requirement in a sheet rather than as text on the panel.

(But really, it should be in Apple's font preferences, and it should take effect in all applications immediately without any of them having to restart.)

Also usually when one sets preferences, we tend to go from pane to pane (at least I do). Right now we have to keep going back up to "Show All" and then select the next set of preferences. Would be nice to just have a button to go to the next page of prefs on each page.

I think so too. In the first round of updating our preferences our goal was to make them consistent with the other preferences in the system and see how well that worked out. The current arrangement is better than our old scrolling mechanism for quick direct access to any preference for experienced users as any preference is now just two clicks away ("Show All", then click directly on the desired panel without having to scroll), but is more awkward for exploring every preference. Since that's often the first thing people want to do when they pull up preferences, it gives a bad initial impression.

I don't think it's difficult to get the best of both worlds, and hopefully you'll like our solution.

Originally posted by Zarafa:
Ken, would it be possible to at least do something similar to what MacIE does with regard to HTML/CSS standards and such -- if an author specifically makes a DOCTYPE declaration that states their page is HTML 4.01 Strict (for example), then only those entities, attributes and such allowed in that HTML version would be supported?

I expect we'll be doing this quite soon: after all, if we don't, we probably won't display some pages the way authors who target IE intend, and you know what I think of that!

The snow yesterday was great, wasn't it? (Fortunately, I live within walking distance of the office or I might not have made it home Thursday night.)

Originally posted by eevyl:
If you want to hit the jackpot in Spain, release a localized Spanish version of Omniweb with Mac OS X Final. A lot (and when I mean a lot I mean almost everyone) Apple users in Spain surf the web with IE just because is the only one that is localized in Spanish.

OmniWeb pays attention to the user's language preferences, and uses a localized interface if one exists. Of course, we need help from native speakers of other languages to actually build those localized interfaces.

Originally posted by clebin:
Regarding language support, it would be even better if there were language plists inside the packages so users could add their language if it isn't supported.

In fact, that's exactly what we've done: if you open up beta 9, you'll find a number of localized "English.lproj" resources which contain all of the Interface Builder ".nib" files and "Localizable.strings" files which contain every English word which we display to the user in the application. Translators can localize these resources, creating versions for their own native tongues (e.g., adding a Spanish.lproj everywhere there's currently an English.lproj).

We haven't been pushing this a lot yet because the interface is still in flux (and we don't want to ask people translate everything now and then have them have to translate it all again later), but if anyone wants to get a head start on translating OmniWeb to their own language the infrastructure is already in place.

I appreciate your participation in this forum, and can't wait to see your OSX release of Omniweb. I will add a strong second for CSS1 and CSS2, DOM, and HTML compliance with W3C standards. The stagnation in browser "innovations" since the demise of Netscape has allowed the internet community to place a greater focus on standards compliance. There has also been a number of "alternate" browsers appearing on the market adding to the difficulty of authoring web pages that will display reasonably from browser to browser, let alone authoring for standards compliance. There's alot of very bad HTML out there, mostly written in an attempt to get NN3, IE4 and NN4 to do things they should do, but can't. iCab, Opera and Omniweb should be leading the way in standards compliance, or they will, by mere market numbers, be ignored by the web authoring community.

[gorgonzola]

ugh, why don't you register?

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[Boondoggle]

What I want to know is, When is Apple going to contract with Omni to do a comlete Cocoa re-write of AppleWorks?

[clebin]

I see the lproj directories now - I had a look but I obviously didn't drill down far enough. I'm not a fluent Welsh speaker, but I'll see what I can do with those files. A localised Opera would actually be a nice base to work from.

Cheers,
Chris

[pmcd]

This is a bit off topic but why on earth would you need an office suite when you have Services. One of the nice things
about Services is they get rid of the need for all these gigantic things like Office, etc...Huge do everything suites
should have gone away 10 years ago. Unfortunately Microsoft seems more persuasive than anyone else on earth on the
business community.

Philip

Originally posted by Boondoggle:
What I want to know is, When is Apple going to contract with Omni to do a comlete Cocoa re-write of AppleWorks?

[Brass]

Originally posted by pmcd:
This is a bit off topic but why on earth would you need an office suite when you have Services. One of the nice things
about Services is they get rid of the need for all these gigantic things like Office, etc...Huge do everything suites
should have gone away 10 years ago. Unfortunately Microsoft seems more persuasive than anyone else on earth on the
business community.

Philip

TWO reasons here.

1. AppleWorks is most definitely NOT "gigantic" or "huge", when compared to even a single component of MS Office.

2. We DO NOT have services. We currently have an OS that supports services, but until a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet can be inserted into a Nisus Writer word processing document and manipulated there as easily as an AppleWorks spreadsheet can in an AppleWorks document, then the argument holds little water. (Note, Lotus & Nissus are bad examples, but I was trying to find something obscure).

Probably 90% of the problems I have with X browsers come from the way they render fonts. I know some of this is Apple's fault, but perhaps there is something that could be done.

I for one would recommend looking at how Opera handles fonts. In it's document display preferences it lets you choose via simple checkboxes whether to favor the user or the document in terms of the CSS, Fonts, Links, Tables and so on. Then for each of the major format types, Normal, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, PRE, Forms text and so on you can select a specific font. Finally (and most important) you can set a minimum font size and antialiasing.

This fine control leads to great looking web pages across the board.

How come loading web pages on a slow windows machine (90mhz) seems so much faster than a 500mhz G4 when each are using IE 5? OS X beta didn't seem any faster than OS 9 and may have been slower. Why is it that browsing with windows is so darn fast?

[sadie]

Ken at Omni alledged:
In the first round of updating our preferences our goal was to make them consistent with the other preferences in the system and see how well that worked out.

Hey, are they docklets? Are they going to be? How about dragging them to the OW toolbar?

[Alex Duffield]

Apple help viewer.

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