Re: Censorware Summit Take II, from The Netly News

[Jim Burnes <jim.burnes@ssds.com>]

On Fri, 18 Jul 1997, John Adams wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Lucky Green wrote:
> 
> > Nothing wrong with releasing a GNU browser, but you will find it difficult
> > to impossible to match the features of a modern browser such as
> > Communicator and MSIE. Some may be happy with Lynx. Myself and most
> > consumers will stick with Communicator and MSIE.
> 
> Is there any particular reason that NCSA's Mosaic is being ignored?  Sure,
> it's not GNU (hence not free to *everyone*) but it's out there, and it
> works.
> 

I've always been an admirer of the HotJava concept, if not the 
execution.  In other words, a dynamically modifiable browser that
"learns" how to handle new objects on-the-fly.  When I first read
Gosling's white paper on Java this was the biggest "ahaa!"
I had.  I believe there is a version that uses Python instead of
Java, but despite the fact that I admire Python quite a bit
Java definitely has the momentum here.

How hard would it be to implement a Java-based browser that has
most of the goodies that we need from day to day (crypto, tables,
plug-ins, etc)?

Implement this thing like Linux so that we get a core team going
and everybody starts throwing in chunks of code, objects etc.
The first cut of this beast could be minimal and with its
hot extensibility could grow to accomodate anyone's needs.

Jim Burnes