From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Tom Duff" Message-Id: <10007170956.ZM905012@marvin> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 09:56:33 -0700 In-Reply-To: boyd.roberts@ca-indosuez.com "[9fans] mothra" (Jul 17, 3:49pm) References: <4125691F.0051A93B.00@SNPAR12.> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] mothra Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Topicbox-Message-UUID: dfe6acde-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > 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 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.