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 #--- # Export PGP three lines a time --> http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/export/ M0V]N9W)E<W,@<VAA;&P@;6%K92!N;R!L87<@+BXN(&%B<FED9VEN9R!T:&4@ M9G)E961O;2!O9B!S<&5E8V@L(&]R(&]F('1H92!P<F5S<SL-"F]R('1H92!R M:6=H="!O9B!T:&4@<&5O<&QE('!E86-E86)L>2!T;R!A<W-E;6)L92P@( T*