xmlhack: Netscape 6 arrives

After years of suspense, Netscape 6 has finally arrived, providing strong support for the XML, HTML, and CSS specifications.

While announcing that this browser provides "the best standards compliance of any browser ever released", Netscape also acknowledged that "Of course, like any piece of software in the real it's not perfect." To help developers take advantage of standards-compliance without tripping over bugs, Netscape provides some help:

"Netscape wishes to provide the best possible guidance to developers about known bugs and issues at the time of each browser release. These release notes document known bugs in Netscape 6 with web standards compliance and support for Java, JavaScript, and Plug-ins that developers have asked be documented."

(Matthew Brealey also maintains a list of CSS bugs in Mozilla and Netscape.)

Like Internet Explorer 5.0/Macintosh, Netscape 6 uses DOCTYPE declarations to determine how to render HTML and XHTML content, using two sets of rules for old-style and new-style documents.

Netscape 6 also provides support for simple XLinks and RDF data sources.

Netscape 6 may reinvigorate the competitive nature of browser development, and some argue that Netscape 6 may change the very nature of cross-browser development, moving it from battles over web pages to the development of Web applications.