Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopher for GNOME...
From: Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken@SoftHome.net>
To: gopher@complete.org
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Date: 10 Jan 2001 17:01:35 +0100
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On 07 Jan 2001 01:13:27 -0500, David Allen wrote:
> Oh.  Yeah, that's it.  :)  I did not know that Nautilus is a browser.
> Are they using any pre-existing code, or are they starting from
> scratch?  There's mozilla, there's konqueror, and there's other
> components of free software browsers to be had, it'd be a shame if
> they were to do everything over again.  Implementing browsers is not
> for the feint of heart. 

"Components" is the keyword, and you used it alright. Don't go on asking
me about the gory details, but they did "componentize" Mozilla, and they
also have a gtkhtml component (if I am right, that's a GNOME port of
khtml living its own life now). The whole thing is about reusing
existing "view" code. Gnome-gv will go the same way sooner or later,
just as eog (Eye of Gnome, image viewer), etc. etc. They're fancying a
lot with Mozilla currently, but I must say I like a native GNOME
solution better, so I am glad they didn't leave out the gtkhtml
component. Mozilla's fine for complex stuff that gtkhtml can't handle.

And also please note that this isn't merely code copying or code
bloating, which it would be if all these components were stuffed into
one executable. Instead, such a component is usually shared over CORBA,
meaning in this case that it could be another process running the
component, or a library containing it, or even a process on a remote
machine, and you can dynamically add modules and delete modules (e.g. by
installing Mozilla you add a view for HTML).

OK, that's about as deep as I currently get things.

> > It would be even so simple (at least in theory), that if I provided a
> > Gopher+ module for the GNOME Virtual File System, and did that well, I
> > wouldn't have to worry about the presentation part at all. Given a
> > directory, Nautilus would display a directory. Given an HTML file,
> > Nautilus would display a HTML file.
> 
> Right.  And given a file of type FOO, the FOO interpreter/execution
> mechanism would be used.

Yeah. You'd be able to view the stuff in your browser/ shell/ whatever
without even having to wonder how one shell can do all this exotic stuff
(see above if you do wonder), and the shell gives you the opportunity to
open documents with a given application as well (because, it's still a
darned shell after all, so it has to work for food just like any other
:-).

> > I guess the bottomline is that the difference between browsers and
> > shells is going to fade (at least if you got to believe Eazel, M$ and
> > Apple, but at least you're in charge of your own computer today, if you
> > don't like that kind of user experience :-). All _I_ know is that it
> > will save me handling views for all these thousands of MIME types and
> > other generic stuff. Thanks to Nautilus, I'd have my personnel
> > implementing these parts ;-) and I can concentrate on the protocol.
> 
> Sounds pretty cool.  I don't know if I buy the fading of the
> distinction, but time will tell.  Maybe eventually we'll all have
> connections that are fast enough to seem that there isn't any
> difference.  (*drool*)  I'm not going to say that anything *isn't*
> going to happen, since the computer field tends to enjoy making fools
> out of people who suggest something is impossible.  :)

Yeah, but also out of people who think this-and-that *is* possible. Just
this morning I read another article of such a guy claiming "the GUI is
30 years old and has to go". "Right", I think. "So what's your proposal
for a replacement?" Guess 3 times -- he was fooling around with some
silly 3D interface. "Directories come from the workplace metaphor of
folders, they have to disappear", the nutcase claimed on. Personally, I
think this guy's a fruitcake.  Everyone is currently like "OK, so first
we had this CLI (sort of 1D), then the GUI, (2D), so what's next? Oh,
it'll be 3D, then" and then claim they are thinking revolutionary.

Well excuse me. I *do* happen to have the experience of standing in a VR
cube with such silly glasses on your nose, trying to navigate through a
3D system on some kind of expensive SGI mainframe. You had to shoot at
planets, and then strange things happened and there was a new set of
planets. Upon asking what this was supposed to be, I was told that this
was the 3D equivalent of directory browsing. Oh, right. I will *not* be
tempted to stick 4 fans on my PC just to have a "revolutionary" shell.
It's not useful. They are all staring themselves blind at this 3D stuff
and forget that it doesn't really add that much functionality /an sich/.
I'm not trying to say "64k ought to be enough for everyone", but even
today the CLI is far from dead, and it still is functionality that
matters. So I can easily predict that no matter what the future will
give us, I will not be shooting planets, nor will I have a computer
without directories (the pure horror of the idea, with today's
plentiness of files!).

> > OK, that's in theory. For now, I only have this standalone app, that's
> > right. And indeed, it doesn't support one darned view other than
> > plaintext :-)
> 
> Well I'm sure that will change with time.  Besides, half the fun of
> programming isn't using the software, but watching it grow.  Well it
> is for me anyway.

For me, half of the fun is making stuff that makes people wonder "why
the hell are you making this stuff"? The guy who ported Quake to the
ASCII Art library is God to me (OK, that's a lie, I don't really worship
people ;-). I like to claim that programming is a form of expression
anyway. Talking about expression in software, my moronic logo for
Gnopher is now online (only the server is currently down again).

Greets,

Stefan