Re: 'External' viewers
Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
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Message-id: <4ghAcgMB0KGW42LGgg@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 1993 19:02:20 PDT
Sender: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
To: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch,
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen),
kevin@scic.intel.com (Kevin Altis)
Subject: Re: 'External' viewers
In-reply-to: <9310071732.AA14497@rs042.scic.intel.com>
References: <9310071732.AA14497@rs042.scic.intel.com>
Excerpts from ext.WorldWideWeb: 7-Oct-93 Re: 'External' viewers Kevin
Altis@scic.intel.c (1358*)
> 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.
So write a better window manager. Nothing in the protocol keeps you
from doing it the Mac way, for instance. Or trade your X11 system for a
Mac. :-)
Another option is to lobby for a modest change to toolkits, so that the
user, when invoking a program, can specify the window which the
application will use. If, say, both ghostscript and xv knew how to do
this, a browser like XMosaic could easily use the same window for HTML
(via its own parser/viewer), Postscript, and images. What a win! By
the way, neither ghostscript nor xv are built with a standard toolkit;
each uses xlib more or less directly.
Bill