Re: [9fans] mothra

["Tom Duff" <td@pixar.com>]

> how come mothra bit the dust?
I wrote it.  It was not in good condition when I left
Bell Labs.  Understantably, nobody else wanted anything
to do with it, so it died.

Its biggest shortcoming (other than its general
internal hidousness) was that its document imaging
model was fixed before <table> entered the picture.
Deep down it believed that documents were running text
with embedded line-breaks and indent changes, meaning
there's no good way to get tables or frames to work.

Also, if your browser doesn't closely match Netscape
and Microsoft, people will believe that it just doesn't
work, regardless of how good a job you do of meeting the
published specifications.

On the other hand, I still think its idea of how to handle
navigation (mostly the panel with an LRU list of pages visited)
was better than anything else I've seen.

Writing a web browser is a fool's errand.  The specification
was changing faster than I could type, and still is.

-- 
Tom Duff.  Just a minute, I think I've got one in the car.