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NGLayout Status - Detailed!

by CHRIS NELSON | Angus Davis, Product Manager for NGLayout and Rick Gessner, the Director of the project have submitted two great updates to the newsgroups which I've decided to print in their entirety here. First, we hear from Angus with a status update and some specific appeals for programming help. Then, Rick Gessner steps in with a message from the Director, and how you (designer / coder / user) can help the NGLayout project succeed.

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AD: I'd like to congratulate the NGLayout team, including all of you helping via mozilla.org, on some great progress this week. Here's what's been going on:

On the Mac front, Pierre, Don, Greg and Thom have the Mac version of the viewer laying out! There's been great rapid progress on the Mac side of things lately. Your help is needed - write to pierre@netscape.com and dcone@netscape.com to contribute code and help out with the Mac effort.

On the HTML front, one big win this week was Steve Clark's terrific work on implementing the CSS2 "table-layout" property. With fixed width tables, content developers can see their tabled pages render twice as fast, if not faster! Write buster@netscape.com to help out on tables issues. Specifically, help is needed hooking up other CSS2 table-related stuff. (see note about update to "get involved" page, below)

CSS. DOM. Two great standards that NGLayout supports fully now inter operate thanks to fantastic work from Vidur, Peter, and Kipp. Now you can dynamically modify style attributes on elements. For example, you can dynamically change the width of an image using JavaScript. This is powerful stuff - expect to see snazzy test cases next week.

Kipp and Peter have hooked up a bunch of significant improvements to NGLayout's style system, content model and layout capability that addresses CSS bugs and enhancements. I'll be updating the "Get Involved" page with some additional projects in this area soon (tomorrow?)

Rick Potts threw netlib out onto its own thread. Can you say "per-for-mance?" This is a big boost! Now, any volunteers for gutting/cleaning up netlib, all 500k of it? Email valeski@netscape.com to pitch in if you're a networking geek. If you want to help out on threading stuff, send a note over to rpotts@netscape.com.

Adam Lock continues to update the snazzy NGLayout ActiveX control he's been working on. Adam doesn't have a netscape.com email address, but he's an important part of the NGLayout team. You can be one too by contributing some code, testing efforts, or even just ideas about where we should be going with the project.

Notably, the Web Standards Project has launched a campaign around NGLayout. In a true sign of Open Source, someone else is issuing a press release about a product even before Netscape does. Although the point of the campaign is controversial, it's great to know there are fans of NGLayout out there, and we especially got a kick out of the "I Want My NGLayout" graphic.

Other work continues and I apologize if I've forgotten to mention something, which I surely have. As always, you can follow along with all significant check-ins via: news:netscape.public.mozilla.layout.checkins

Finally, I'm the bozo that's working with leaf@netscape.com to get nightly debug builds of NGLayout online for everyone's enjoyment. So it's my fault they aren't there yet. Currently, we just need to hand over some tinderbox scripts to leaf so he can set up an automated process to post builds. This should happen RSN.

Have a great weekend hacking NGLayout source!

Next: An appeal from Rick Gessner.

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