[wplug] Web eMail Link Mozilla

Alexandros Papadopoulos apapadop at cmu.edu
Fri Oct 3 08:32:19 EDT 2003


On Friday 03 October 2003 02:34, you wrote:
> Alexandros Papadopoulos incurred the wrath of Bob on Oct 2, by saying
>
> >On Thursday 02 October 2003 18:01, Bob Schmertz wrote:
> >> Andrew Biggadike incurred the wrath of Bob on Oct 2, by saying
> >>
> >> >Without the extension you receive an Alert pop-up box saying
> >> > "mailto is not a registered protocol."
> >>
> >> Ouch!  Can you say "b0rken"?
> >
> >I can say version 0.6.1 - things are bound to be incomplete.
>
> Good point -- although I've gotten to the point where I don't pay a
> whole lot of attention to version numbers; a lot of pieces of softwre
> and libraries out there have been crucial components of Linux OSes or
> apps for years, and still haven't reached 1.0.  And I was surprised
> to hear of its incompleteness, given the ringing endorsements from
> characters who are anything but Open Source True Believers.

Well, Linux itself was getting ringing endorsements when it was still in 
1.0 (FAR from complete, not that it's anywhere near complete now). I'd 
assume that some people get blown away by the potential of a project, 
treating the results to date as just another milestone.

> >It would also be interesting to figure out what a browser that:
> >- has no native mail component
>
> Like IE?

Now, now. IE is not just a browser, it's part of M$-Windows [0]. Let's 
not compare apples and oranges. IE knows about your default application 
because it can directly query your registry, and launch it from there 
(with mixed results of course - I would doubt it works properly for 
more than a handful of MUAs)

>
> >- has no knowledge of the OS it's running on
>
> A Firebird compiled for Linux knows it's running on Linux.  Maybe
> you're talking about extra frills it could use, such as the
> facilities provided by a GNOME or a KDE?

I was under the impression that the codebase for Mozilla is common, 
irrespective of architecture. Same goes for many portable applications 
(like KDE - doesn't know if it's being compiled for BSD or Linux). 
Unless this impression is mistaken, the browser doesn't know what OS 
it's running on.

> >- has no knowledge of other applications available
> >should do, when someone clicks on a mailto: component.
>
> Maybe prompt for the path to an application that can handle it?  If
> the Mosex plugin can handle it, why isn't that put straight into
> Firebird?

Perhaps because the very nature of external application handling assumes 
OS knowledge. You'll notice that the versions of mozex offered at 
http://mozex.mozdev.org are OS-specific. This means that incorporating 
them to the browser codebase would break the OS-agnostic nature of the 
source (which has a bunch of benefits, trading off for small annoyances 
like the one we're discussing).

-A

[0] In case someone is tempted to comment that it runs on MacOS, well, 
no more. IE was so coupled with the internals of M$-Windows that 
porting it to Mac wasn't worth it any more. Still, even during its 
glory days, IE supported two OSs, while Firebird currently runs on M$, 
MacOSX, Linux, OS/2, Solaris, BeOS, AIX, and I assume all BSDs (but no 
one has bothered to mention them separately :-)




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