Re: HTML forms

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:06:44 PST, "James P. Salsman" said:
> audio conferencing.  If you wanted to provide for students 
> on several different platforms, you would have to provide 
> a microphone capture application for each of them.  Then,

Sounds like a straw man to me.

When was the last time you bought a microphone/audio card for
a system that didn't include at least basic software to do this
sort of thing?

And I'm the one who always complains that vendors don't ship
support for AIX (Macromedia Flash, RealAudio, and StarOffice being
at the top of my wish list this week).

> Only a few mail user agents provide that capability.  Back

Well, the MIME spec came "out of the box" with audio MIME types.
Put the blame squarely on the MUA developers, the protocol supported
it - in fact, I believe one of the early MIME 'stress test' messages
included an audio clip, while RFC1341 was still at I-D status.

> in late 1996 some language instructors on one of the distance 
> education lists (DEOS?) or newsgroups were claiming that 
> voice-email presents more trouble than it is worth, at least 
> for some students.

There are those who find VCR's challenging.  It isn't NTSC's or PAL's
fault...

On Thu, 30 Mar 2000 18:37:59 PST, "James P. Salsman" said:
> There was a lot of concern that a consensus would be too dificult 
> to achieve unless there were some entry barriers.  The other 
> reasons involved mutual nondisclosure and similar features of 
> quickly-emerging technology companies.  None of those reasons

And you're claiming that with MORE voices, consensus would be easier
to achieve now?

Also, I've heard from several people "I have browser XYZ written by 3
or 4 people, it's tiny, fast, and implements most stuff".  Which,
actually, was my point - it's pretty easy to write a browser that will
implement MOST stuff.  However, by the time you do full HTML 4,
Javascript, SSL, CSS, Java, and whatever else, you're looking at a
pretty big pile of code, unless you're just in the "Let's see how far
into the wilderness we can push feature XYZ at the cost of other
support" game.  Sure, 2-3 programmers can get a basic minimal browser
done - but 2-3 programmers are probably not going to implement
*enough* of the esoteric stuff that they will start needing to worry
about what partially-specified feature XYZ really means, unless feature
XYZ is already widely acknowledged to be defined in a brain-dead manner...

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Operating Systems Analyst
				Virginia Tech

Received on Thursday, 30 March 2000 22:59:13 UTC