From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Wed Apr 12 2000 - 21:18:44 PDT
On 12 Apr 2000, Karl Anderson wrote:
> I hope that soon the browser will be just a component of this app
> platform. Every browser today is a too fully featured. It should
> talk to the cache, proxy, filter, cookie manager, identity manager,
> history & bookmarks manager, etc, not contain them. The rendering
> engine itself should be further componentized. There should be no use
> for a separate text & graphical browser, there should just be
> different rendering/page navigation frontends on a tiny skeleton of a
> browser that can be swallowed by the platform at will.
While I agree completely, it's by no means a new idea, this is how it
_should_ be.
But... I gave up on this happening years ago for a few reasons.
First off, if things worked this way, the OS wouldn't matter, so the OS
vendors won't cooperate, they live and die by proprietary APIs that can
maintain their monopolist position and prevent people from switching,
and then there is Windows.
Next the whole thing requires a high level of integration and
standardization that just not possible in the real world. Businesses
don't play well with others, and geeks don't either. Neither will follow
a standard unless they have no choice. Open source sounds like a
solution to get people to work together, but it's not - Sourceforge
alone lists 25 projects that are ICQ clients. How many Linux
distributions are there now?
And lastly, what would all those coders do to make high wages if they
didn't have to reinvent the wheel at every job. Business doesn't fear
components the coders do becasue 99.9% of all coding is wheel
reinvention. Reinvention is easy, any coder can do it, and can be done
while doped up on caffeene or beer. *cough*Linux*cough*. Go search for
an ftp client, or a irc client, there are dozens if not hundreds of
them. Not invented here.. [chant along] not invented here... I like my
paycheck... not invented here...
It won't happen, humans don't work that way. Create something small,
fast, and easy to reuse, and everyone will hate you for it.
In an ideal world, we'd just pull the code we needed out of a big
library along with the header and HTML documentation. Need to handle XYZ
protocol *click click*, *call functions*, done. Lets see how far I can
push something like that before I get squished... *sigh*
- Adam L. Beberg
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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