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Dave,

Give it up. It's like trying to explain radio to the ancient egyptians.

"It's this box, it gets signals from the air and turns them into sounds."

I've been fighting the backwards compatibility battle for too many years. 
The best response is to stay ahead of the curve and let others surf in the
wake (to mix metaphores.)

Consultants who have been in this business for a while went through a 
period of time when nobody understood the difference between the online 
world and the Internet.

It was perfectly clear to many of us years ago that AOL, Prodigy and 
others would one day be Web gateways, and if we set up a web-server, 
ultimately, almost everyone would have access to it.

A gentleman from Intel, of all places, announced at the first WWW 
convention at CERN that Mosaic would be on every desktop by the end of 
1995. Wasn't so far off.

At the same time, most of my customers wanted their documents available
for gopher as well as Web, because AOL had gopher capability, even though
the advent of the AOL gopher launchpad made Veronica (to search
gopherspace) a useless technology (***too many connected, please try again
later***), and we knew that gopher servers would be obsolete before there 
was a big enough user base to make the services offered truly useful.

The Internet is *still* a party where most of the guests haven't arrived. 
By the time they get here, they'll have Java on serious desktop 
workstations. Or interactive TVs or whatever. I'm still waiting for some 
intelligent guidlines from the LOC or NIST that will let us know how long 
GIF will be useful. Should the US Holocaust Memorial Museum be developing 
a huge GIF archive or TIFF or JPEG or all of the above? The answers are 
clear to technologists, but businessmen and archivists need a good 
technology handbook for considering forward and backward compatability 
issues.

People who understand the development of technology know what technology 
is real and useful and where it is going. In some cases those are 
consultants and developers, but not generally. 

The thing that makes no sense about developing on the Net for windoze is 
that you have to develop again for the other client systems. Java gives 
you a tool to do it once, and a frame w/in which it will execute.

the only reason there is no java for windoze is that windoze cannot 
support multithreading. When you understand the Netscape technology and 
their alliances with Adobe and Macromind and RealAudio to integrate
PostScript and Lingo and RAF (respectively) and you understand that 
Netscape also liscenced Java which has built-in PostScript and a 
multimedia scripting language that's more robust than Lingo and has 
built-in scalable audio streaming (RAF is not scalable) and you've seen

http://java.sun.com/applets/applets/stockdemo/standalone.html

then you know the future and know what system to be developing for. Why 
do it twice or 3 times or whatever when none of them are as good as 
option one?

so....

you develop services on the server (a UNIX box) that recognized the 
browser and delivers a page that is optimal for the browser that has made 
the query (useing PERL or C or LISP or whatever language you choose to 
write your browser recognition script.)

and you choose your UNIX box based on your particular preference, but 
know you're using a flexible, scalable, amazingly well supported system.

and that built in tools (like vi) make better HTML editors than all the 
gui kludeware's out there. 

'later,

Dave
         _       david levine, president           zoe kerstin levine
    _   __\<     huskylabs  410 889 3409       june 22, 1995 10:33 am
   (_\_/___\ _   motodave@monarch.butterfly.net       7lbs 2oz   19in  
   / \_/_|| X \  http://www.butterfly.net/motodave/     cute as a bug 
  ( O==\\_/( O ) authorized sun & sgi resellers 
   \_/  ~~  \_/  more solutions than you can shake a stick at. 



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