Later, he wrote an email client at Netscape, but the team that was responsible for actually displaying the message never shipped their component. “There was just this big blank rectangle in the middle of the window where we could only display plain text. They were being extremely academic about their project. They were trying to approach it from the DOM/DTD side of things. ‘Oh, well, what we need to do is add another abstraction layer here, and have a delegate for this delegate for this delegate. And eventually a character will show up on the screen.’”
My opinion is that the best way to solve the technical issues is to mandate that the ASCII #9 TAB character never appear in disk files: program your editor to expand TABs to an appropriate number of spaces before writing the lines to disk. That simplifies matters greatly ... »
"I've decided to start putting together a weekly mixtape: a cassette-tape-sized chunk of music that I enjoy, and that you should enjoy too. Some will be new, some old." --Jamie Zawinski
Summary of classic the worse-is-better vs. the-right-thing discussion by Richard P. Gabriel.
