Re: Spyglass HTML Validator

Matthew James Marnell <marnellm@portia.portia.com> writes:
>:>Redlining only so far as our development resources for this freeware
>:>product were very limited, and the Validator uses Win95 resources to create
>:>its windows, widgets, etc. The code has an OS check in it, to make sure
>:>it's running under Win95, so it simply won't run under WinNT4.0, although
>:>it's theoretically compatible.
>:>
>:>There are some registry issues to work out (which our Rumanian QA engineer
>:>Vasile is looking at right now), and I expect that next release will run
>:>under WinNT4.0, plus include updates to several DTDs. I'm really waiting
>:>for the MSIE 3.0 DTD to be released, so we can include that one, plus
>:>hopefully an update to HTML 3.2. No dates as of yet.
>
>In light of this, are we to assume that anyone not using Win95 or
>NT will ever see this product?  And getting source to port it
>to something a twee bit more portable like Java or Tcl/Tk is
>probably out of the question.  Pitty, that.

I can pretty confidently say no. The source is rather large (hundreds of
files) all in C++, and the GUI uses all the Win95 standard library widgets.
As for the parser, it's not likely anyone would want to port an SGML parser
to Java, even if there were good reasons to do so. Performance is quite
important, and I can't imagine how slow the parser would be in interpreted
code.

The C++ parsing code is platform independent. What isn't is the GUI, which
would require a complete re-write for each platform. We have no plans to
recreate the GUI in X or Motif or Mac or anything else right now. If our
higher-ups look at this as a saleable product (kinda out of MY hands), we
might see a porting effort and a substantial product enhancement. Apart
from that I rather doubt it.

Murray

```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
    Murray Altheim, Program Manager
    Spyglass, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts
    email: <mailto:murray@spyglass.com>
    http:  <http://www.cm.spyglass.com/murray/murray.html>
           "Give a monkey the tools and he'll eventually build a typewriter."

Received on Wednesday, 30 October 1996 11:12:58 UTC