Netscape won't be releasing the source code for Communicator 5.0 until Tuesday. But Friday, a group of several hundred extensible markup language (XML) developers had an advance look at "the lizard."
Netscape engineer Ramanathan Guha gave the presentation and demo at the XML '98 conference to show the throngs that the next version of the browser had extensive support for the new markup language, the standard data format expected to replace HTML, the Web's current lingua franca.
With Tuesday's source code release, that support is only likely to deepen. Guha reportedly said that Netscape has separated the XML-specific code into a separate module, which will be placed under the direct control of the XML developer community.
XML represents a shift in the way information is coded for the Web. The language offers a flexible, powerful means for describing data and the structure of that information, but not the way it looks in a browser. That task is left to a cascading style sheet or the still-embryonic extensible stylesheet language.
The XML specification also includes the built-in capability for a Web page to gather information from other Web sites, to potentially allow for sites such as e-commerce Web superstores.
Microsoft, which cosponsored the conference, has begun to embrace XML support in all of its major applications. Redmond already provides limited XML support in Internet Explorer 4.0 and uses it at the core of its hush-hush Chrome graphics rendering project.
But those who attended Friday's session say that based on what Netscape showed off, the company is going much further than its browser rival.
"This was really exciting - the room was just stunned," said one participant. "... We hadn't expected any browser to provide this kind of XML support for at least a few more months."
Tim Bray, coeditor of the XML 1.0 specification and creator of the developer resource XML.com, said in an email interview that Netscape has already accomplished the laborious task of setting up its Mozilla rendering engine to work with XML, cascading style sheets, and HTML.
According to Bray, Guha said the developer version of Communicator will include a Netscape-developed parser, that part of the browser which processes the XML code.
But Bray expects that once the code is in the hands of XML hackers, Netscape's home-grown parser will be swapped, within a day or two, with XP, a freely-available XML 1.0 parser authored by UK-based developer James Clark.
"As to the finer details of how XML should be managed and xlink implemented and so on and so forth, [Guha] expects to outsource most of that work to the XML development community, who know more about XML than any 10 Netscape engineers," said Bray.
