Gecko (layout Engine) - Standards Support

Standards Support

Contents
  • Firefox 5 and higher
  • Firefox 4
  • Firefox 3, 3.5, 3.6
  • Firefox 2
  • Firefox 1.5
  • Firefox 1
  • History of Firefox
  • Features of Firefox
  • Gecko
  • Add-ons
  • Extensions
  • Firefox market adoption
Origins and lineage
  • Netscape Navigator
  • Mozilla Foundation
  • Mozilla Suite
Category

From the outset, Gecko was designed to support open Internet standards. Some of the standards Gecko supports include:

  • HTML4 (partial support for HTML5)
  • CSS Level 2.1 (partial support for CSS 3)
  • JavaScript 1.8 (ECMAScript 3, and partial support for ECMAScript 5), implemented in SpiderMonkey
  • DOM Level 1 and 2 (partial support for DOM 3)
  • XML 1.0
  • XHTML 1.0
  • XSLT and XPath, implemented in TransforMiiX
  • MathML
  • XForms (via an official extension)
  • RDF

Gecko also partially supports SVG 1.1.

In order to support web pages designed for legacy versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer, Gecko supports DOCTYPE switching. Documents with a modern DOCTYPE are rendered in standards compliance mode, which follows the W3C standards strictly. Documents that have no DOCTYPE or an older DOCTYPE are rendered in quirks mode, which emulates some of the non-standard oddities of Netscape Communicator 4.x; however, some of the 4.x features (such as layers) are not supported.

Gecko also has limited support for some non-standard Internet Explorer features, such as the marquee element and the document.all property (though pages explicitly testing for document.all will be told it is not supported). While this increases compatibility with many documents designed only for Internet Explorer, some purists argue that it harms the cause of standards evangelism.

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