Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: HTML support in Mac OS?

Author:Nicholas Riley
Posted:5/8/1999; 12:51:54 PM
Topic:HTML support in Mac OS?
Msg #:5847 (In response to 5843)
Prev/Next:5846 / 5848

Many things killed OpenDoc, but I seriously doubt Frontier's lack of support for it was one of them. I'm not going to either attack or defend Dave personally over this, it's not up to me to do.

What if Frontier had put in the time to support OpenDoc? Did you see what happened to Nisus Writer when they made the decision to support OpenDoc? Nisus got behind in supporting new word processing features to go through two generations of buggy OpenDoc support libraries, got some bad reviews from magazines because of OpenDoc bugs, and almost went out of business, having to lay off several programmers. The same thing happened with PowerTalk/AOCE support, some developers put lots of time into it and then Apple killed the project. Same with QuickDraw GX printing. Apple has a better track record recently, but there are still some significant missteps (promising Intel support for OS X Server then pulling it).

Neither the Apple Help Viewer nor the Apple HTML displayer in OS X Server currently supports enough of HTML to be useful for building user interfaces. You're right, Cyberdog would have been perfect for this, it's still the friendliest browser created for the Mac. So instead a possible solution is available with Gecko, which has the advantage of being supported on almost every platform under the sun. It has to get a lot better before it's usable though. The Preferences dialog box I tried in the M5 release on the Mac was an exercise in frustration.

If I were Apple, I'd get some programmers to work on Mozilla, getting it up to scratch for the Mac, then package it properly so it's easy to incorporate on Mac OS and Mac OS X. No offense to the current Netscape Mac team, there just aren't enough of you.

--Nicholas

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