From: stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)
Date: Sun, 23 Jul 95 21:38:43 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: RE: Netscape the Big Win(dows)
Message-ID: <199507240435.VAA11194@ix7.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 06:36 PM 7/23/95 -0400, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>The reason that Netscape has either built-in news reading or mail reading
>functions is feature creep.  [....]
>  In-line gifs or jpegs (or mpegs or whatever) are integral to
>the function of seeing what's on the web.  So are in-line FTC, Gopher, etc.
>I think.  My opinion about e-mail and news are that they're pretty
>orthogonal to the functionality of a web-browser.  

When you're building software to run portably across a variety of
operating systems with varying levels of multitaskability or brain-damage,
building a big monolith with good modularity inside seems a reasonable
compromise,
and it means you don't have to do as much work to define interfaces that
talk to everybody else's cool application program.  Since URLs are designed
to let you point to just about anything, it's real nice if your browser client
can actually do something useful with any URL it finds.  I think that includes
sending mail in response to mailto:s (though not receiving it; that's really
Somebody Else's Problem), and at least popping up a crude newsreader to
read news: URLs.  

It would certainly be nicer to have a system that's
aggressively tool-based with obvious interfaces chosen to call other
applications
if the user configures them instead of the default app.  On Unix that's
usually easy
(fork/exec with some appropriate command-line args and popular data formats);
on Macs it's not too bad; on DOS, well, anyway.  Winsock at least means that
Windows applications have some chance of using the network compatibly at the
same time, which was previously a major annoyance; now it just makes it
harder to
use the _Microsoft_ clients along with Netscape and your other cool apps,
but hey.
#---
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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