Laying Out Mozilla

Most folks know that the Mozilla project is Netscape's great experiment in Open Source–a way to reach back to its roots in community-developed software. Our readers also know that Microsoft has been slowly whittling away at the browser market. Our own statistics show that in early October 1998, our readers were using Mozilla 56 percent of the time and Microsoft Internet Explorer 37 percent of the time. In January of 1997 the breakdown was 75 percent Mozilla and 16 percent IE. It's clear that some of the increase in market share is strictly due to marketing strategies, and some may be because Microsoft's browser has done a better job, so far, in supporting style sheets. But that may change soon.

The Next Generation Layout Engine, NGLayout, will soon be available from the Mozilla Web site, and what's more, so will the source code. Based on open Internet standards such as HTML 4.0, CSS1, CSS2, XML 1.0, and the Document Object Model (DOM), and using Netscape's XPCOM, NGLayout is designed to be an embeddable component. This will let developers use all or part of the engine in their own applications outside of traditional browsers. Components include a document parser (handles HTML, XML, and arbitrary document types); a layout engine with content model; a style system (handles CSS, XSL, and so on); JavaScript runtime; image-rendering, networking, and user-preferences libraries; platform-specific graphics rendering and widget sets for Win32, X, and Mac; and a Navigator plug-in interface and Open Java Interface (OJI), among others.