Re: Pythia: Really bad ideas

wmperry@spry.com
Sat, 21 Jan 95 15:08:51 EST

Albert Lunde writes:
> >
> > To be fair, you should show what they have at their top-level page
> > <URL:http://pythia.com/>. Note the <i>ized text in the opening paragraph:
> >
> > ==========
> > <p>This site serves the users and developers of the Pythia Publishing
> > System. Pythia is an advanced WWW product which is intended for commercial
> > and scientific applications. <i>Pythia is not a 'general-purpose' WWW
> > browser. It is not aimed at individual users</i>. It is based on current
> > HTML/HTTP standards, but has proprietary extensions to support features
> > like [...]
>
> It does seem that they aim to preserve the ability for their clients
> to access conventional WWW servers. A regular client that ignores unknown
> tags and attributes will most likely not choke on their HTML, even
> if it might look ugly.

Well, if you look at something like:

<address>
William Perry<br>
wmperry@spry.com<br>
316 Occidental Avenue South, Suite 200<br>
Seattle, WA 98104<br>
More info<br>
</address>

Their browser will show it as 5 separate 'pages'. :) I consider that
not being a general purpose HTML browser. They use <l> for <br>, and <br>
for a hard page break. Ugh.

> I'd say that once higher levels of the HTML standard come along, they
> will have a hard time differentiating themselves.

Definitely.

> It may be worth looking at to see if there's anything to add to a HTML
> features "wish list", but I wouldn't pay much attention to the details.

They didn't add much really. I took a tour around their pages, and 10
minutes worth of work and they looks decent in the emacs-w3 browser. They
seem to be the second browser to support inlined mpegs now, wheee. :)

-Bill P.