Apple's take on Mono? Re: [Mono-osx] OSX Reality Check

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

    What seems interesting from your post is that its not an
architectural problem with ASP.NET, but a limitation in Microsoft's
implementation:

> The way XHTML rendering is determined in Whidbey is done by using  
> browserCaps and this in itself is ok. The problem though is that they  
> have set it up so that ONLY browsercap entries that are known to work  
> with XHTML output gets it, as opposed to only omitting XHTML output  
> for browsers known NOT to work with XHTML.  Might seem like a small  
> thing, but with new versions of browsers coming out all the time,  
> this means we'll have to maintain the browsercaps on a regular  
> basis.  I and a few of the others expressed a concern about this very  
> early on in the Whidbey phase, but never got a positive response to  
> it.  This would not have taken long to fix at all...

This is certainly something where open source can do better, we would be
willing to change this, and we could use your advise. 

> There's also a massive problem with the rich functionality in ASP.NET  
> -- it only works with IE. Their javascripts are written in such a way  
> they would only ever work on IE and as such, all other browsers get  
> the dumbed down WebPart controls etc (no drag n' drop for instance).

Mono's implementation (specially starting with 1.1.9) will use
cross-platform JavaScript that offers this in at least Mozilla and IE,
and we will take patches for other browsers (consider our new
client-side validators that work on all browser, not only on IE).

Also, Chris Toshok has done quite a bit of JavaScript and Ajax hacking
(JUnit) and is quite excited at the possibility of bringing all the Ajax
beauty to those controls in a cross platform fashion.

This is the time to get involved in Mono/ASP.NET hacking, and move folks
from Windows to Linux ;-)

Miguel