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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!yarrina.connect.com.au!news.mel.aone.net.au!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!netnews.nwnet.net!news.u.washington.edu!Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU!mrc From: Mark Crispin <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU> Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc,comp.sys.next.programmer,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.sys.next.advocacy Subject: Re: NeXTBSD - 4.4BSD For NeXTstep machines ? Date: Thu, 8 Feb 1996 00:44:03 -0800 Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing Lines: 89 Message-ID: <Pine.NXT.3.92.960207232551.25734A-100000@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU> References: <4e84c1$m0n@axl02it.ntc.nokia.com> <4f2h1e$jo9@pub02.va.pubnix.com> <Pine.NXT.3.92.960204125419.17765B-100000@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU> <4f9akj$2co@gaea.titan.org> Reply-To: Mark Crispin <mrc@CAC.Washington.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: tomobiki-cho.cac.washington.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII NNTP-Posting-User: den To: William Shipley <wjs@omnigroup.com> In-Reply-To: <4f9akj$2co@gaea.titan.org> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.sys.next.misc:38736 comp.sys.next.programmer:22824 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:2179 comp.sys.next.advocacy:32743 On 7 Feb 1996, William Shipley wrote: > (c) you didn't have an old vendetta against me and my company dating from > back when we were stuck at the UW as well. I have no idea what you are talking about. The best that I can guess is that maybe you were some student who flamed me because we didn't support Mail.app or some such. If you honestly believe that I would remember you for that, you have an excessively high opinion of yourself. > couldn't you at least be specific? I only used Omniweb once, and the experience was such an incredible exercise in frustration that I gave up. Here are some specifics for you: I tried to paste a URL from an email message into the "Open URL" panel. It beeped at me. I had to type it in manually. [No, I can't reproduce it now, but it was solid then.] When it got to the URL, I was hit by a barrage of model error panels complaining about the GIF images. It took a while before I realized that for some reason it decided to call an external program to resolve the GIF images and it was that program that was blatting out these panels. I didn't even know that program did GIF (it's a special purpose image resolution tool for a completely different application). I could find no way to tell Omniweb not to use that program, other than removing it. Netscape lets you configure this. But I plodded through, until I got to filling in a form and hit the submit button. It pressed, but did nothing. It was at that point ther I gave up and ran Netscape. I just tried it now, with a URL that displays perfectly well with Netscape, Mosaic, and eWorld's browser. I was rewarded with: "Fatal Error (#500) Can't Access Document http://icons/ftp.gif Reason: Can't locate remote host icons." The maintainer of that URL said, and I quote, "Your browser doesn't handle relative pointers right, common bug in old code". He also pointed out that <LI> entries weren't displaying bullets, and that lines which are delimited by <BR> had bogus doublespaces. "Fatal Error (#404)" when trying to open bookmarks, well golly gee, couldn't it have looked to find the Mosaic bookmarks in the well-known filename? Why does every dinky Web browser think that it has to have its own private bookmarks file? The fact that others get this wrong too doesn't excuse Omniweb. Plus, it should have offered to make a new file instead of saying "Fatal Error (#404)". "Open URL..." sometimes forces you to click in the TextCell for no apparent reason. To reproduce, first up OmniWeb and immediately type Command-Shift-O (which, by the way, is a terrible choice since Command-o is also used -- consider Command-l which is more-or-less standard). At other times, the cursor appears in the TextCell without requiring the mouse. "Open URL..." opens a new window, even though the Preference to do this is unchecked. I tried the URL that gave me the frustration before and all the same things happened, including the submit button doing nothing at all. As far as I could tell, it first collects the images, then invokes the external program. It seems to do this in lockstep, with no attempt to thread the gathering from the net with image resolution. This makes image display much slower than Netscape (especially Netscape 2.0 which just flies), even when the image resolver is the right program. This slowness is quite frustrating, particularly with URLs with lots of images; it reminds me of the way Mosaic used to perform. Try as I might, I was unable to find any international character support other than for Western Europe (ISO-8859-1). So much for using any URLs in East Asia. Nor did there seem to be any way to set fonts. I have no idea what version of Omniweb it is; I didn't install it. Maybe it is an old buggy version. The version number in the Info Panel is unreadable; don't you test things in monochrome (or is it your attitude that monochrome users shouldn't be using your software)? The latest file date seems to be February 3, 1995, if that helps. -- Mark -- DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045 ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39" Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.