Netscape Revs Mozilla's Engine

Computergram International, April 20, 1998

Netscape Communications Corp has made some additional source code of its Communicator product available on its mozilla.org web site. The site was launched earlier this month as a hub for developers to download the source code and post back their enhancements for use by Netscape on what is known as a copyleft licensing basis.

The new code includes an XML (eXtensible Markup language) parser and a technical preview of the company's next generation layout engine. The parser is code named Expat and was developed by James Clark, the technical lead of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) XML working group. He does not work for Netscape and the company says this is the first major addition to the Mozilla source code from a third-part developer. The layout engine, which is code named Raptor, will eventually fully support HTML 4.0, cascading style sheets, the W3C DOM (Document Object Model), XML and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) - an XML extension. Since its establishment two weeks ago, there have been some 100,000 downloads from the Netscape site in addition to about the same number spread across 100 mirror sites around the world, according to the company. And it got its first change from a developer 24 hours after the source code was released.