Re: 'External' viewers

kevin@scic.intel.com (Kevin Altis)
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Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 10:28:42 -0800
To: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch,
        marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
From: kevin@scic.intel.com (Kevin Altis)
Subject: Re: 'External' viewers
At  5:57 PM 10/6/93 -0700, Bill Janssen wrote:
>I've never thought that
>one particular viewer should be privileged.  Perhaps the `browser'
>shouldn't even have a viewer window, and all documents should be viewed
>externally.  In some ways, this is what window managers were intended
>for.

Ack!!! That's exactly what I don't want, tons and tons of windows because I
have to use an external viewer for every different content type (document)
I open and even those external viewers force you to have a different window
for each document. I wouldn't complain so loudly if the most common window
managers did a half decent job of letting you navigate around more than a
handful of windows, but they don't. Most of our current operating
system/window managers don't have a clue when it comes to color models
either (unless they're 24-bit or higher) so the more windows with different
colors the more screwed up your display gets. I absolutely refuse to spend
my entire day minimizing and maximizing all my stupid windows and trying to
decide which icon really represents the document I want to look at. The Mac
(with a system extension or two) is the only machine I've ever used that
deals with lots of windows and lots of colors in a sensible way. Since
nobody else seems to be going in that direction, I want to keep the number
of windows to a minimum.

ka