Re: Some proposed package removals and additions

[Matthew Berg <galt gothpoodle com>]

On 28 Aug 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:
 
> There is one crucial difference. Writing a simple window manager is a
> task for one person and 6 months or so, on that order. Writing a real
> web browser that handles 99% of sites is a task for a huge team and
> multiple years. Some people seem to think Mozilla took a long time
> just because of XUL and bloated features; these people are on
> crack. ;-) Opera and IE also took a huge amount of resources, and
> Opera is still broken last I tried it.

Very true. Though I've never been of the mind that its a simple task,
especially given the entrenchment of bizarre browser-specific tags.
My objection to XUL, however, lies solely in questioning the wisdom of
designing an application that looks out of place on all platforms. :)

But I'm not trying to start a flamewar. 

> We are NOT going to waste our time and resources on a web browser
> project. It would be fantastically silly. If the L&F is a big concern,
> Mozilla could simply be hacked to use native widgets for forms; that
> would be much easier than starting over.

I don't know that its any more silly than any other project that
reimplements something for the Gnome desktop (e.g. word processors, e-mail
clients, terminal emulators).  But that's besides the point, as I didn't
ask anyone to devote time or resources to it.

As for hacking it to use native widgets. I'm all for it, if it is
feasible.  I've never taken a hard look at the source for Mozilla, so I
have no idea how closely tied their code is with XPtoolkit.

> GtkHTML is a lightweight HTML widget, not a browser. It doesn't have
> and shouldn't have stuff like JavaScript. If some people are happy
> seeing only 85% of the web, then we'll provide the option to use
> GtkHTML for browsing also, but if they then complain about not seeing
> 15% of the web they are being silly and should use Mozilla. There is a
> fundamental tradeoff here.

I definitely agree that it shouldn't have things like Javascript and Java
shoved into it, but what about CSS?  As Dave Mason mentioned, there is
interest in using CSS in the help system, where, IMHO, we shouldn't need
to load up a full-fledged browser.

And just because GtkHTML itself is a widget shouldn't necessarily rule out
the idea of building a browser utilizing it, as Encompass does. 

In any case, I don't want to give the impression that I disapprove of
people using Mozilla, or Nautilus providing a way to embed it.  It just
feels wrong to put out a Gnome release that includes external software
that doesn't use a Gnome UI.  I don't see it being much different than
wrapping KOffice components and throwing them into a release.

Matt