[5415] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Re[2]: NCSA's un-free browser - NOT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Behlendorf)
Mon Aug 29 16:47:39 1994
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 1994 22:41:48 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: brian@wired.com
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@wired.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
On Mon, 29 Aug 1994, Sheerin, Peter wrote:
> Right. In fact, this will hopefully resolve a complaint many had a
> while back -- that with so many different commercialized versions of
> mosaic, each being enhanced in their own way, multiple, incompatible
> standards would evolve for security issues, extentions (add-in
> modules) to Mosaic, and perhaps even in interpretation of the HTML and
> Web specifications that would make developing web pages even more
> confusing than it already is.
>
> IMHO, having one central clearing house for the commercial version
> should help solve this.
It would seem to me that it wouldn't be hard to define an internal API (or
set of APIs for the different classes of features) to the free browser such
that public modules and private modules can work together easily. For
the ambitious, the private modules could be supplied as pre-compiled link
objects, so that people wishing to make changes to the public portions of
the code can do so easily (and stalling off the temptation from the
companies putting out the browser to change the way everything works).
The definition of these API's is certainly out of my league, though.
Also, as for "multiple, incompatible standards"... I'm not worried about
that, for it's pretty easy to divorce the protocols from the
client/server design, and any company that tried to introduce its own
proprietary standards without working within the developer community
will, well, have their work cut out for them.
Brian
