From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200007181831.TAA12571@whitecrow.demon.co.uk> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] mothra In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 18 Jul 2000 16:38:59 -0000." Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 19:31:55 +0200 From: Steve Kilbane Topicbox-Message-UUID: e31b2cae-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 It seems to me that the reason why a web browser would be such a behemoth is because current browsers try to do everything in one. Breaking the problems down might produce something that's more reasonable. The protocols should be separate. Whether it's something as simple as writing a URL to a ctl file and reading a page back from a data file, or something more subtle, I don't know, but the posting and fetching shouldn't have much of a clue about what to do with the result. Since the spec keeps changing, maybe the returned page could be translated into a local language that was more stable, and more attuned to using a filesystem as the underlying namespace model than URLs. For doing the translation, perhaps a leaf could be taken from troff's book, and have subcomponents of the page translated into something else - the underlying, internal language. There's always going to be some sites (or parts of them) that fall through the gap and don't work. But that's true now, for everyone... steve