Re: Nautilus 2.6 - We're going all spatial

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Tue, 2003-09-16 at 08:52, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
> Alexander Larsson wrote:

> > 
> > Just a note: The Navigational model is *so* not about browsing the web.
> > A navigational filemanager is still a *file* manager.
> 
> I do realize that. OTOH, I'm not thinking of a "Navigational model" 
> here, but rather of a file manager that can *also* be used to browse the 
> web and/or view HTML documents. This is what Internet Explorer and 
> Konqueror do today, this is what the original Nautilus was supposed to 
> do, if I'm not wrong (weren't you supposed to use Nautilus directly to 
> connect to the Eazel site and take advantage of xxx services?). And, 

And these behaviours are what we're *trying* to avoid.  The Konquerer
and Explorer model are evil, and trying to explain it to average
computer users (most of my family, the 100 or so employees in this
building, friends, etc.) often fails.

A web browser browses the web.  A file manager manages files.  A PDF
viewer views PDF files.  Start merging them all, and you get a mess.  We
*could* merge our toasters, showers, lawn chair, and car, and it may be
a fun project that has certain conveniences, but I think most people
would agree it's still not the ideal way of doing things - I don't want
to have to fire up my car to make toast.  ;-)

> again if I remember well, Galeon 1.x allowed to browse the local folders 
> and files on a user's disk. There definitely is some overlap: 
> navigational file manager + HTML view = basic web browser. Anyway, it 
> was more of a provocation than of a serious proposal.

A file manager + HTML view would be an embedded HTML file viewer, not a
web browser.  Web browsing is a *lot* more than file viewing - its
networking communication (not even file-oriented communication),
embedded component viewing, data submission, etc.  Opening an HTML file
in a file browser is just letting you see the rendered contents of the
file, just like an embedded PDF viewer does.

And of course embedded usually sucks.  The only time I've ever seen
embedded be useful and not irritating is when searching for files that
need lots of information from to identify (thumbnails of a dozen
pictures of my sister aren't generally in enough detail to find the one
with the goofy face).

Even then, there's probably a better way to do it than embedded views...

> 
> Ciao
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.