Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 21:21:14 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: "Joel N. Weber II" <devnull@gnu.ai.mit.edu> Cc: hasty@rah.star-gate.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Plugin? (Re: Complaining at Warner Brothers? ) Message-ID: <17457.866434874@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 15 Jun 1997 21:40:12 EDT." <199706160140.VAA15678@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
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> Wait a minute. > > We all agree that we have a problem because Netscape won't give us > their source and let us adapt it to their needs, right? No, I certainly am not one in agreement with this. I don't see that Netscape is under any obligation to give us source at all, and saying that it's a problem is sort of like saying that not being able to take any arbitrary chunk of matter and turn it into food through advanced transmogrification technology is a problem. Sure, they're both problems in a sense, and having solutions in hand would be wonderful, but they're also issues for which the solutions are so far out of practical reach that it's just really not worth debating them. I'd like anti-gravity for cheaper space flight, too, but just wishing for it won't make it so. :-) > And now we turn around and say that we're perfectly happy if the > RealAudio and Shockwave folks provide us with programs for which > we don't have the source? > > I see a double standard here. Not me, I see only confusion here. :-) I don't think that anybody has realistically called for anybody to give us source, not Netscape and not Shockwave. There's no way in hell that they're going to do it so why debate it at all? This is just silly. > Do you consider Netscape's API `reasonable'? I don't think I do, > based on what I've heard. It doesn't matter whether it's reasonable or not, they've set the defacto standard and if you choose to go off and roll your own for whatever reasons then you're making decisions out of expediency rather than general wisdom. > Seriously, can you give me one specific example of a case where > a user is going to provide a useful plugin for which it would > make more sense to have a plugin than actually changing the source? Uh.... Why on earth would any user want to hack on your browser if they could just write a compatible plug-in? I certainly wouldn't, and just trying to syncronize the different "extended" browser versions would be a farging nightmare. Imagine a set of pages designed to work with JoelBrowser version 3.0 with the FooVision and BarAudio extentions compiled in (rather than being dynamically loadable plug-ins). You find the extentions on the net, you compile up the browser, joy! You can see the page! Then you follow a link at the bottom and now it says you need JoelBrowser 2.3 with the BazFilter extention (3.0 broke the BazFilter and the author is still working on updating it). Now what do you do?! And that's just 3 possibilities - the array of potentially incompatible extentions is theoretically unbounded and it would be realistic for the average user to just give up in disgust after recompiling JoelBrowser for the 5th time, just in order to view a page. Yuck. This way lies madness. Jordan
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