From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Tue,  1 Sep 1998 08:28:40 -0700
From: Tom Duff td@pixar.com
Subject: [9fans] what is the present status of mothra?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 7e161fee-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19980901152840.BeYSjRV7x1gQtIfaNbwJz3aKY0_uV2d-t_Y3Qt_azvY@z>

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.