NETSCAPE OPEN STANDARDS GUARANTEE

"Because all

Netscape

products

have been

designed

from the

ground up

to work on

open networks,

interoperability

and support

for standards

are part of our

technological

DNA."

We will adopt the major open standards recommended by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other appropriate, vendor-neutral standards bodies, such as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Object Management Group (OMG), ECMA, and others. We will also assume a leadership role in proposing new standards when there is real customer demand and where such standards do not yet exist.

Because interoperability is so critical for the continued growth of the Internet and corporate intranets, the Netscape Open Standards Guarantee applies to all of our products. For example, look at Dynamic HTML, which is actually an umbrella term for a number of different, yet interrelated, proposals at various stages in the W3C review cycle. Web designers have been telling us for the past year that they need a more precise way to position HTML objects on a page, so we proposed an extension to HTML that helps developers create more compelling Web pages. While Netscape and Microsoft originally offered different visions of how to solve these design problems, we have been working through the W3C over the past six months to bring these different proposals into alignment. Since the first preview release of Netscape Communicator in December 1996, Netscape has adopted the W3C recommendation for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS1), an element of Dynamic HTML that Microsoft has also pledged to support.

A second critical element of Dynamic HTML is Positioning HTML Elements, which is currently a W3C working draft jointly authored by engineers at Netscape and Microsoft. And now the Document Object Model (DOM), another core piece of Dynamic HTML, has become the subject of a W3C working group in which Netscape actively participates, along with other companies, including Microsoft. In response to interested developers and customers, Netscape has also joined the XML Working Group, along with representatives from Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and other companies. There are times when we would like to see the process move faster, but it takes time and commitment to reach consensus. In essence, we believe the standards process is working. In keeping with our guarantee, we plan to adopt open standards recommended by the committee for Dynamic HTML, whether originally proposed by Netscape, Microsoft, or another member company. We believe this open standards process provides the best vehicle for resolving alternative vendor proposals and achieving the highest degree of interoperability for customers and developers.

Similarly, our position is consistent in the emerging space of "push" content delivery. If major open standards are accepted and eventually recommended by the W3C, Netscape plans to fully adopt them. We recently launched Netscape Netcaster, a new component of Netscape Communicator that features push channels, offline browsing, and the ability to create a "webtop" - all using existing standards such as HTML and HTTP. Because it is based on these existing standards, Netcaster brings push capabilities to existing Web sites without requiring any changes to their content. Netcaster allows any Web site - from the smallest mom-and-pop site to large sites such as Yahoo! - to become a push channel. What's more, Netcaster allows site designers to use HTML tags and HTTP-based Web servers to make push transmissions more efficient - and even more dynamic if they so choose. This approach is in sharp contrast to Microsoft's proposed Channel Definition Format (CDF), which seeks comparable efficiencies but requires an entirely new format and a new file that each Web site must create and continually maintain. We find this new format unnecessary because Netcaster has provided all of the promised benefits of CDF using existing HTML tags. Nevertheless, we will work through the W3C standards process and implement additional standards as they are recommended.

In fact, Netscape recommends that all vendors begin working through the existing standards bodies early in the product development cycle to gain consensus when different approaches might be proposed. A great example of this effort is the Open Profiling Standard (OPS), a new initiative proposed two weeks ago by Netscape, Firefly, and VeriSign, and endorsed by more than 60 other companies. This initiative could serve as a model for industry cooperation around the standards process since advertising agencies, large Web sites, search engines, and hardware and software companies are all supporting this proposal. OPS would allow Web site developers to offer personalized content and services that match individual preferences while protecting the user's privacy.

With OPS, Netscape has served as a consumer advocate by proposing a standard that would protect individuals' rights to privacy while enabling better personalization of services on the Net. The key is that this proposal is supported by many companies in the industry and has been submitted to the W3C well before it will actually appear in commercial products or on Web sites. This typifies how we can all work together through the standards process in the future. From a technical perspective, the OPS proposal is a good one for customers who truly need these features. And because Netscape, Firefly, VeriSign, Microsoft, and more than 100 other companies have now joined together to build upon the OPS proposal, the industry has essentially reached consensus around it well before building support into products. This level of cooperation is virtually unprecedented in the industry.

Another example of a new proposed standard that Netscape has endorsed well before it is implemented in products is the Meta Content Framework (MCF). This proposed standard was first announced with Apple and a wide variety of industry partners in 1996. It provides a common way for Web sites to describe all of their content in a summarized form, which can then be used for many purposes, such as a browser creating a site map, a search engine determining which portions of a site to index, or a channel client periodically downloading portions of a site for better efficiencies. Public support for MCF has been announced by many industry partners, and it is already used by more than 200 sites on the Net. Netscape plans to implement MCF in future versions of Communicator, and is working with standards bodies to gain consensus on MCF as a proposed standard before it appears in new products.

To further underscore how effective this approach has been in the past, look back at the results of Netscape's leadership in the establishment of other open standards, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). The implementation of the LDAP standard has been widely adopted by the industry, with more than 50 companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and others, supporting it in their products. Again, the key is that many companies adopted this proposal before it was offered in commercial shipping products. Other examples include Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the first broadly adopted Internet security standard, and Java and JavaScript, the Internet's first broadly accepted application environment. Microsoft, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and other companies have joined in the standardization effort - initiated by Netscape through ECMA - to standardize JavaScript. We believe JavaScript will become an ECMA standard sometime in the third quarter of 1997.

Yet another example is our adoption of the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), which enables Java applications to be integrated easily with legacy client-server applications. More than 50 companies have adopted this open standard, which has led the OMG to grow to more than 800 members and increased the popularity of IIOP-enabled browsers for application development. By working with outside companies early in product development cycles, we have been able to provide our customers and developers with both new functionality and new standards for interoperability. In nearly every case, Microsoft has followed Netscape's lead and has adopted these standards in products it later shipped.

Netscape has often been the first to adopt existing standards in new products. Some of these standards include HTTP, the core data-transport protocol for the Web; NNTP, the building block of Internet newsgroups; and SMTP, the core Internet protocol for sending and receiving email. Today Netscape supports a wide variety of Internet standards in our shipping products, including POP3, IMAP4, SNMP, X.509, SET, SQL, SOIF, RDM, RTP, RTCP, VRML, and others. Netscape is also the first to fully implement HTML 3.2 in our core Web browser, Netscape Navigator 4.0, which is part of Netscape Communicator.

Because all Netscape products have been designed from the ground up to work on open networks, interoperability and support for standards are part of our technological DNA. Over the last three years we have led the computer industry in understanding how open standards can be used as the basis for building sophisticated applications on the Internet and in corporate enterprises. We have also created a great new product family that features the most comprehensive support of Internet standards found anywhere. Through our Netscape Open Standards Guarantee, we have made a commitment to customers that we will continue to support the major open Internet standards that are recognized by appropriate standards bodies. We also pledge to continue our leadership in proposing new standards when they are needed by customers, and working with other companies in the industry to gain their agreement. We believe this provides customers and developers with the broadest range of choices and the greatest degree of interoperability between products from various vendors.