re: xmosaic experience

Kim Peter Nyberg <kny@cs.hut.fi>
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1993 12:20:40 +0200
From: Kim Peter Nyberg <kny@cs.hut.fi>
Message-id: <199302261020.AA22920@cardhu.cs.hut.fi>
To: WWW-TALK@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: re: xmosaic experience
In-reply-to: <9302252239.AA21530@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
References: <9302252239.AA21530@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
	<EfXGE90B0KGWQv0bZM@holmes.parc.xerox.com>


First of all, excuse me for jumping into this discussion all of the
sudden, but I couldn't resist. Being one of the members of the former
Erwise-team, I have some ideas about X-browsers (Erwise is a Motif-based
www-browser, implemented as a student project at Helsinki University
of Tech. during 91-92)

Marc Andreessen writes:
 > The X Window System has this (to me, fatally flawed) design decision I
 > hadn't suspected.  X windows can only be so big.  Up to the size of a
 > 16-bit integer, in fact, in pixels.  This is really really bad.  This

Well, unless we'll be seing >32k*32k displays in the near future, it's
not that bad.

 > means that the other WWW X browsers (at least Viola and Midas, the
 > only two I've been able to get working) will *not* correctly handle
 > documents that, when layed out, take up more pixels in height than
 > that -- e.g., your RFC.  Go try it on them.  Then look at what X

Erwise works correctly ;)
Actually, doing the scrolling by hand (even in an optimized way) isn't
that hard, you might want to take a look at our code (available at
anonymous@nic.funet.fi:pub/unix/hypertext).

Yes, I know, the code is something of a mess, especially since we
hacked a bit on the common code to get non-blocking transfers working
(it's nice to be able to retrieve multiple documents at the same time
and read through the ones on your screen, though).

 > Mosaic does, which is lay out as much text as possible in the window
 > and then give you convenient automatic inlined hyperlinks to the
 > remainder of the text, partitioned into window-sized chunks.  Then
 > tell me who's making fatally flawed decisions.

Hmmmh, no offence, but I think that's not not the correct way to solve
the problem.

Btw, have the current x-clients implemented non-blocking transfers?
It should be implemented in the common code, maybe it already is. It's
really too bad that we don't have the time to support erwise (three
of us are working almost full time at a software company, and try to get
on with our studies as well). Maybe in the summer ...

 > Marc

Kim