[olpc-software] AbiWord, HIG

[Alan Kay]

Yep, but do we now require people to download FireFox? That would surely be 
a harder sell than getting them to download a plugin that will work in the 
browser they are using. We already do that.

Given that the web came after 1990, one wonders why its shapers were so 
unable to understand what was already being done for and by end-users 
(going all the way back to Engelbart). MS will copy anything (but it had 
nothing to copy and has never been known for any sparks of understanding).

Cheers,

Alan

At 10:07 AM 3/15/2006, Mike Hearn wrote:
>On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 09:11 -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> > But we are looking for a way that is more automatic for all the other
> > users in the world. And we are even OK with the idea of giving up our
> > own advanced tools in favor of something more recognizable to the
> > majority of open source programmers so long as we can fulfill the
> > requirements in some other way
>
>It's worth noting that whilst the web in general is limited, Firefox is
>not. Specifically it has:
>
>* SVG/MathML support for declarative graphics
>* JavaScriptable Canvas for immediate-mode graphics
>* contentEditable which turns it into a basic word processor.
>
>and they're looking at adding some 3D support too. So dynamic graphics
>seems to be improving at quite a rate. And there's always Flash ;)
>
>Firefox also lets you extend the rendering engine in virtually any way
>by using an obscure form of Gecko plugin called (I think!) XTC? It means
>you can register new XPCOM objects that handle new types of tags that
>appear to be regular features of the web page to authors. So new stuff
>can be added quite easily.
>
>The web has the advantage of being very familiar to people, and it's
>easier to extend now than it ever was.
>
>thanks -mike