[9fans] what is the present status of mothra?

[Tom Duff td@pixar.com]

On Sep 1,  1:32pm, Kenji Okamoto wrote:
> Subject: [9fans] what is the present status of mothra?
> Mothra, now I know it means MOSURA :-), does not read Japanese text.
> mothra can read my Plan 9 home page with many of encrypted lines,
> although I translated those text to UTF.

I would have guessed that mothra worked fine with UTF-encoded CJK
text -- sorry I can't check it out.  It certainly will not read JIS.

More important, it won't do tables or frames, which didn't exist when
it was written.  The notion that html encodes a sequence of variable-font
strings (and forms widgets) that can be laid out using a fairly simple
auto-wrap algorithm is built in to mothra at the deepest level.
Getting it to do boxes-within-boxes (like tables or frames) is
likely to be fairly difficult.

It's ias hard for a single programmer to keep up with the pace
at which web standards change as it is to understand why standards
change.  For example, I can't imagine who thinks that we can't live
without animated gifs but we don't need built-up equations.

-- 
Tom Duff.  Past performance is no guarantee of future returns.