Re: tlug: Netscape code going public

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Hajime" == Hajime Saitou <hajime@example.com> quotes somebody:

    >> What could M$ do -- GPL theirs?  I can't imagine that.  The

Then you're not as smart as Bill Gates; he is imagining it.  Whether
he'll decide to do it---probably not.

    >> only other money saving choice is stop development on it.  They
    >> are well and truly impaled upon their own petard.

No, they still own the Windows market because they own OLE, as others
have pointed out in this thread in more detail.

>>>>> "Hajime" == Hajime Saitou <hajime@example.com> writes:

    Hajime> Well for M$ to get truely worried, Netscape would have to
    Hajime> have full support for japanese. So long as you can't input
    Hajime> japanese characters directly into Netscape, M$ have
    Hajime> nothing to worry about. At least in the Asian markets it
    Hajime> doesn't. Europe and the US I don't know about.

Netscape is a Motif app.  I don't much like Motif, but you do get XIM
for free.  This may not be conveniently implemented in Netscape, but
all the Linuxers I know want to use [X]Emacs as their editor even if
Netscape is their M/NUA.  This is now possible thanks to some freely
usable code from Netscape and an XEmacs interface by Karl Hegbloom
recently posted to xemacs-beta.  So the issue is "can you do searches
on yahoo-nippon?", and the answer is yes.

    Hajime> On the other hand, if these issues get cleared Linux would
    Hajime> probably get the killer app it was looking for. Rewriting
    Hajime> Communicator to use GTK would get XIM into Netscape so the
    Hajime> input problem would be partially solved...

I doubt it.  Motif support for XIM is much more mature than GTK's.

The beta [sic - that was alpha-level code, it didn't handle all the
interesting cases according to the description, I doubt the author
knows about let alone handles the more arcane error conditions] patch
posted to the GTK list can be assumed to be a long way from robust:
I've written Xlib-level code for XIM---it's bloody hard because the
specification was written by Japanese in English (you know the
problems---difficulties with `a' and `the' are a guarantee that the
specification invites off by one errors and ambiguities on the
boundary cases).  So you can't be sure that the weird Xlib
interpretations are wrong.  It's going to take a long time to work out 
the bugs in that code (I mean Xlib, the GTK patch could be bug free
according to the spec but Xlib is not).


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