Netscape integration

[Steve Lamb]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Thu, 01 Jul 1999 09:39:47 -0600 (MDT), Gary Granat wrote:

>But, the basic job of any editor is to provide a way to get text into the
>environment is a way that is basically useful.  The editor in PMMail isn't
>your whizbang full-feature programming editor, but it does the basic editing
>job and does it fairly well.  

    Moderately well at best.  Even so, there are idiosycrocies between the
editor on OS/2 and the editor on Windows.  If they port to BeOS, it happens
again.  Am I the only one who sees the editor as one of the most common
interfaces into many programs and, thus, should be standard around a single
editor of the user's choice, not the editor of each seperate packages
programmer's whims?

>And, there is something to be said for being able to get assistance for any
>problem with an application from a single source.

    Is there?  I'd love to know what it is.  I've gotten more useful help,
faster and easier from the Linux community as a whole than I ever have from
Microsoft (have to pay for that), IBM or any other single source of help.  In
fact, the primary support venue for PMMail, for me, has never been Southsoft
even though I am a beta tester.  It has been *here*, this list (in both its
locations).  

    Furthermore, again, if they ship with a single editor as default they can
support that single editor just as well as they can support their current
crippled editor.

>The issue of support can't be ignored in a modular environment, and that
>environment becomes orders of magnitude more complex when one is dealing with
>the idiosyncracies of several, mutually exclusive, platforms, each of which
>has a significant suite of potential modules to be plugged into the basic
>application framework.  How to support that sort of a kludge has to be
>factored into the equation early on or it won't work for beans.

    The issue of support isn't ignored, it just isn't relevent.  As for the
different OSs, etc, so what?  I am sitting here, right now, writing this
message in vim on Win95.  At the same time I am editing text files on my
Linux
box at home in vim.  At work, I use vim to edit profiles for my customers in
vim on Solaris.  At the same time, if I had an OS/2 box, I could use vim to
do
my work there.  Before I nuked my BeOS partition I use vim to do editing work
there.  If I were an Amiga user I could use vim there.

    The point isn't, use vim (I dislike the vi modal approach and would never
advocate it, but...), the point is that the code I am advocating that they
approach is highly portable.  Most OS code is written on one of the 'nixes
and
can be ported over to OS/2 with very little trouble.  Windows takes a bit
more, but it is entirely doable.  These platforms are not "mutually
exclusive"
as you think they are at the application level.  It is only when you get into
the lower levels of the OS, the specifics of the TCP/IP stack being the
largest sticking point, does one have major problems.  And considering the
editor, spell checker and pgp don't need to use the TCP/IP stack, two of them
would be libraries with no GUI to port, that leaves file operations which,
for
the most part, are standardized across the board.


- -- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
- -------------------------------+---------------------------------------------

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPsdk version 1.0 (C) 1997 Pretty Good Privacy, Inc

iQA/AwUBN3uWbHpf7K2LbpnFEQLwuQCgphdgovvdvv43gtrGlJFnp5ocbc0An3+R
Qi5G/bo1H7tBP2ieUizavZx8
=8/TR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----