mothra

[forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk forsyth@plan9.cs.york.ac.uk]

>> performs.  The only things it beats mothra on are
>> features that I never got to, mainly tables, hard-copy
>> output & netnews.  Its page formatting sucks dry air,
>> its navigation buttons never do what you want, it
>> makes it as difficult as possible to type urls, its
>> menu layout is, at best, bizarre.  I look forward to
>> not having to use it any more.

i can't stand netscape myself; i use it only when some site
officiously throws me into a distinct `download Explorer' or `download Netscape'
page for every page i select.  (they nearly always want to make
their pages ugly and confusing by using `frames'.)

it's interesting that in recent releases of Netscape, asking for
netnews puts you in what is almost a completely different program,
with a substantially different interface.  being Netscape, that different program
is buried inside the web browser (along with a Java interpreter,
and the rest of an amazingly ugly CGI operating system, following in the tradition of
Emacs and Perl).

td was right not to implement tables months ago; the specification
has changed significantly (it's now more straightforward).
similarly for all the other crud that died with HTML+ and HTML3.0.
i'm considering implementing tables in mothra now, since
someone here complained about it.

i've got a separate netnews program called `rin' built using the panel library.
the name is full of significance for me.
since netnews is mainly text, however (or rather, something that passes for
text, if not for thought), the approach followed by beto and others
of making the news reader a client of acme (cf. Mail) is better in many
ways.  then again, cat >/dev/null is often just as good a news reader as any.