*BSD News Article 60921


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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>
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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.