[geeks] Web Browsers that Don't Suck

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 13 Apr 2002, Brian Hechinger wrote:

> newsreaders and MUAs shouldn't even be graphically able.  they shouldn't have
> the ability to render HTML.  they should just be able to show TEXT and nothing
> else.

Agreed.  I have some design notes somewhere.  I was basically going to
make it MIME-aware (for the sake of attachments), but have a plug-in
system for viewing all MIME-types.  The only one that would get installed
by default would be text/plain.  Being able to view attached pictures[1]
and such is nice, but it shouldn't be core functionality.

This way, folks who -want- to be able to view that crap could, and folks
who didn't, wouldn't be forced to have a huge binary in memory with half
of its "features" turned off.  Folks with the plug-ins turned off would
just be prompted for an external viewer or a save-as dialog.

This is just one of the billions of examples that prove dlopen() is your
friend. :)

--Jonathan
[1] There will always be folks who thing that e-mail is a generic file
    transport.  Yes, these people are idiots.  But some folks -like-
    swapping pictures/pdfs/whatever over email.