Browser gripe

Netscape).

reasons!

Today's statistics may be tomorrow's history -- there's a strong rumour that AOL will revert to bundling Netscape/Mozilla in a future release -- unleashing tens of millions of users who'd expect sites to still work for them. http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/08/1957252&mode=thread It makes sense -- why own Netscape and bundle Microsoft? The moral I draw is the same as yours --- to stick to the standards not the vendor's extensions. I do most of my browsing with Opera and will only fire up IE or NN/MZ on a site that chokes on Opera if it really looks worth my while. I guess I'm with Tim Berners-Lee when he says "The power of the Web is in its universality" -- why dilute that power by restricting access? Sunanda.

I think the point to take from this is that AOL are dismissing Linux as a minority issue in the same way that others dismiss non-IE browsers. Both may be wrong. It's also worth scrolling right to the bottom of your browser identification lists and looking at all the odd balls that make up less that 1% of your visits. Dismiss these at your peril. They are the spiders that index your site. Spiders are browsers too. If they get confused by your HTML or info is hidden behind clever dynamic URLs or stuff they can't cope with, they'll give the site a miss -- or only index part of it. Most spiders are written for speed, not cleverness, so many have an IQ below room temperature. Confuse 'em and you'll lose 'em. If it is at all important that a site is findable via search engines, then that is another good reason to keep your HTML to standards. And, if you do use a new browser-specific extension, it's a good idea to first make sure that it does not trip up the spiders you rely on. Sunanda.

Quoting from an article on ITworld.com: Most of the world's business data, approximately 75 to 85 percent, is written in COBOL," adds Bill Payson, president and CEO of Senior Techs, an Internet-based job bank for experienced IT professionals in Campbell, Calif. "That translates to some hundreds of billions of lines of code." COBOL is used in some manner by almost all Fortune 500 companies. Many of these companies have a large pool of COBOL-based applications that are primary business systems. E-business requires these systems to be integrated and connected to the outside world. "With the future of all commerce linked to the Internet, companies with massive databases know that success depends on the ability to move data in and out of the Internet," Payson explains. Paul Halpern, director of traditional development solutions at Merant, a Web-enabling training company in Mountain View, Calif., maintains that, "If all the COBOL programs stopped working, the US economy would collapse." And he points out: "Nine out of ten of the top Internet brokers use COBOL with CICS [Customer Information Control Systems]. Chances are that when you use an ATM card you are starting a COBOL/CICS process. An IBM report published last year indicates 30 billion COBOL/CICS transactions are executed worldwide each day, more than the total number of Web pages hit each day." An obvious conclusion would be that it's not worth bothering with an unknown upstart language with a non-existent job market and a total transactions-per-day count that isn't even in the range of round-off error compared to the volumes mentioned above. At least not until it "forges ahead" of COBOL...

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Greed. Pure and simple. Companies that cannot compete in technical excellence usually resort to the "4 L's" -- lies, license, lock-ins, and lawyers. Judge for yourself where this applies. -jn- -- ; sub REBOL {}; sub head ($) {@_[0]} REBOL [] # despam: func [e] [replace replace/all e ":" "." "#" "@"] ; sub despam {my ($e) = @_; $e =~ tr/:#/.@/; return "\n$e"} print head reverse despam "moc:xedef#yleen:leoj" ;

with

for

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will

Absolutely true. Essentially I'm sure it comes down to money. With the AOL/Time Warner merger, there's a lot of political infighting, and much has centered around profitability and growth. For instance, the magazine portion of the ATW empire is supposed to grow their readership by 20% a year. If they don't, that magazine is sold off. So I'm sure AOL has some pressure. It'll be relatively easy for them to grow by 20% yearly - all you have to do is consider how many people are _not_ online. But, I'm sure there is some pressure to improve profitability - not to mention reduce dependencies. So, moving to the Gecko rendering engine for their browser and new AOL client will mean that they don't need to pay MS for the IE component. Once again, rumors are circulating about AOL and RedHat - mostly centered around AOL using Linux systems to replace portions of their existing server farm (or perhaps expand it). Again, that could work out to be a huge cost saver over time. Whether it's true or not, who knows. But, as another list member pointed out, it's unlikely that they have any plans for a desktop AOL client. Why bother - most Linux users are likely to prefer their own, plain-jane ISP anyway. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Mozilla 0.98+ (now .99) and IE 5/6. Both browsers are fast, render pages well, and very compatible with one another. NS 4.x version are all terrible - as a web applications developer, it's a major hassle to code for NS 4.x - both in terms of HTML and JavaScript. Things like CSS are actually rendered _more_ correctly on IE and Moz. And hey when you use JavaScript, the DOM isn't all messed up. About a year ago someone raised the interesting point that as NS had fallen to around 10% market share, that web consultancies should consider charging extra to code pages that function identically on IE and NS... Not that I necessarilly agree, but it's interesting to consider when you realize how many services charge extra for special cases. - Porter Woodward

Even though it sound like demagogy, I find this interesting...

Hmm, actually Alan Kay would surely have Smalltalk in mind, but that's another thing ;) Actually that's why I'm so interested in Rebol and Smalltalk. I found that even though their implementation differs in *major* ways, they somehow feel both the same... from a developper pov Best, Chris

..well if my house is an igloo, who do you reckon I should call..LocalInuit101, LinuxTorvalds, Carl Sassenrath.. or my neighboor?

I love Rebol, but I feel like I blinked and lost the plot here in 5 secs. Would someone please step up and describe to me lucidly what makes Rebol the architecture for the Internet that rocks ./Jason

Aprox. one year ago, when we started to design our company website, we considered NS 4.7 line (mainly because I am part of the team and I used NS :-) But we will soon look into the site once again, applying some css styles, with no care of IE 3 or NS 4.x. I use Mozilla here and I am fully satisfied. I used Mozilla on P300 too, and itpushed my comp to the limits, so I sticked back to NS4. It was memory issue however, as 64MB is not enough. OTOH, P300 is archaic piece of hw nowadays :-) I would consider only Mozilla - NS6, IE5, Opera 5, when designing the site. -pekr-

I think Steve is referring here to IOS. It's hard to explain it, but it is really great stuff, and is changing the way I think about a lot of design, development, and communication issues. --Gregg

To get this back onto REBOL, (if it ever was:), should RT even consider trying to get View running in browser windows? Number of OSs supported times the number of browsers on those OSs times the number of versions of those browsers is rather a high number, isn't it? That the REBOL IE plugin broke soon after its appearance because of an MS upgrade should be a warning that it's not really worth the bother. -- Carl Read

Yes I imagend that's the bit I want to hear.. why great? what changes etc.. Has any one articulated this yet ? Rebol has had me hooked since last September. I have all kinds of plans for it, though someitmes it feesl the other way around. I am not sure if it is Rebolor rather thaifts in my balance of thinknig.. more fun more experimentally and experientially actove than before. Somethign seems to hapepn quickyl one I even try out as tiny idea with Rebol to get the conceptual juice flowing. Only propblme now is my ideas aer way ahead fo my skills. I begin to suspect a: dillusion b: re-inventing bycicles in siberia when what I really need is horse or a yurt ie: it has got me wondering more deeply about architectures and network processes. So yesterday I dove into an amazing book called: Illustrating Evolutionary Computation with Mathematica by Christian Jacob. It's part of an online tutorial glittering under the bannerof 'Evolvica' http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~jacob/Evolvica/ Mathematica is nice, but not essential to appreciate whate he's doing. A free MathReader tool will suffice, plus there's Java examples and some other great illustrations. The math and biology are way beyond my present skills, but despite that, I feel am still 'getting' a lot of it. And I suspect growth and adaptation of Rebol-based communications may be very close to opening up similar behaviors . So then I wonder really what is the architectural design for REBOL.. and what direction[s] is it headed? I am ramblling and reaching... Does this make sense to anyone? [time for bed] ./Jason

This results from inappropriate use of the C programming language. People code applications in C, when it is really only suitable for low level OS code.

Regards -- Don Cox [doncox--enterprise--net]

Objection! :) Chris (who spends 85% of his time using C and C++) -- .------{ http://www.starforge.co.uk }-----. .---------------------------. =[ Explorer2260, Designer and Coder \=\ P: TexMaker, Draktar \ =[ All is well. We are not like the others. ]==[ Stack: EEOeOeOeTmTmDD---- ] -- No man is an island, but some of us are long peninsulas.