(2002-06-07) c

Some fascinating notes from Paul Snively the last couple days on considering Mozilla vs external toolkits like MetaKit's [E4Graph] for building Object Browser-like apps (also see comments). The question in my mind is whether Mozilla would be a good broad-spectrum (that is, from rapid ProtoType-ing to deployment) development platform for wholly new data structures and algorithms derived from the Xanadu work. In this context, support of W3C standards, the use of HTTP, HTML, XML, etc. are not only not goals, but are anti-goals... The bottom line remains that while I'm sure that Mozilla is a fine web browser, and quite possibly even a good development platform upon which to experiment with web technology, what I'm suggesting prototyping is emphatically not web technology, and therefore I see a great deal of cost and very little value to attempting to prototype it with Mozilla. My interests are a little less radical, or perhaps I just think a less-radical architecture could achieve the key benefits. But I'm still wary of counting on Moz. Partially because it's a big bag of complex stuff I'm not ready to trust, partly because, even if I start out hacking on single-user stuff, I definitely intend to bleed this into Collaboration Ware. And even if I work on a Rich Client for certain tasks, I want to support a lot from a vanilla web browser.