comments below:

On Sunday, June 15, 2003, at 03:10 PM, Jack Stenner wrote:

> On Sunday, June 15, 2003, at 09:16 AM, Jim Andrews wrote:
>
>>
>>>> I am against the forces of dullness and monopoly. But I am way for
>>>> mind-blowing features that
>>>> transform the mind and experience, transform the desktop into strong
>>>> net integration. but in
>>>> certain ways. not necessarily as microsoft would have it. more open.
>>>> the feds can't just back
>>>> off. they need to be concerned about this recent development where
>>>> Microsoft and Apple attempt
>>>> together to turn the browser into an OS-specific application. Not
>>>> necessarily putting the kibosh
>>>> on it, but keeping the possibility of other browsers--perhaps not
>>>> OS-integrated, perhaps
>>>> OS-integrated, as a possibility. That'd be their job to figure out
>>>> what serves the societies of
>>>> the world best, not Microsoft and Apple. I think as long as they
>>>> continue to support various
>>>> protocols that *are* supportable in other browsers, they will get
>>>> their deeper browser-OS
>>>> integration.
>>>
>>> I'm going to defend Apple as to compare MS and Apple is kinda wacky
>>> imo.
>>
>> I see the issue as a cooperation between Apple and Microsoft, an
>> agreement to back off each
>> other's browser territory.
>
> and:
>
>>> i think you're mistaken to defend Apple and censure Microsoft when,
>>> in fact, they are doing much
>>> the same: building OS-integrated browsers that will be unique on
>>> their respective platforms in
>>> their role in the desktop. and of course they will probably work
>>> fairly closely together, as
>>> they historically have on various projects, including browser
>>> technology.
>

hey Jack, thx for making the arg better than I was doing.

> LOL, cooperation between Apple and Microsoft. The last time there was
> cooperation between Apple and Microsoft, Apple took home $150 mil in
> exchange for Apple bundling IE on every Mac sold (farewell NS...NS/AOL
> doesn't count). Mac users have been saddled with a fairly standards
> compliant, yet feature poor, slow rendering, and buggy browsing
> experience ever since. IE Javascript and Java integration (not
> invented at M$) seem to be purposefully hobbled in the Mac version.
> Meanwhile lazy web designers cater to M$ specific "features" that lock
> out alternative platforms.......(gotta stop, now)
>
> I don't think that what Apple is doing with Safari can be compared to
> what M$ wants to do via "browser/OS integration." In terms of it's
> relationship to the OS, Safari is little more than a replacement for
> the subpar M$ Mac IE implementation. Apple is saying, "Ok M$, if you
> aren't going to provide us with a suitable browser, we'll make one
> ourselves!" M$ response is, "Fine, we'll kill IE and continue to do
> what we've always done by further "embracing" and "extending" the
> net!" They'll do this by integrating the browser (thus killing
> competition), and then providing "features" and "enhancements" that
> tickle the "feature-itis" of web designers who choose not to take a
> stance by supporting open standards. They've done this with DirectX
> vs. OpenGL, C#.Net vs. Java, etc..
>
> I tend to support the underdog in situations like this because of some
> sort of personality quirk ;-) If the roles were reversed I'd support
> M$, or Linux, or whatever, primarily because I think the net will be a
> more interesting, fulfilling, diverse place the longer we can
> forestall homogeneity. The topic of "standards" and "openness" comes
> up a lot...do artists/programmers have a responsibility to be aware of
> the cultural ramifications of their efforts and tailor their work
> accordingly?

i would never knock an artist for making a work IE-only, or
Windows-only, or Linux-only or whatever. since net artists probably
want to reach a large an audience as possible, it makes sense for them
to make something Windows-only if that's all the resources they have at
their disposal. artists are underfunded as it is. we don't have
development teams or other resources to make sure every project works
in every environment (or do as best we can). many of us use Flash and
though the SWF format is technically open that could be changed at
Macromedia's whim. Flash's benefits out-weigh that negative IMO, ditto
for Shockwave.

so, yes, i think artists should be aware of the ramifications but i
would never argue that an artist is under obligation to do anything
with their work, they are the artists afterall. artists dictate what
their work is and how it functions in our society (technically,
socially, economically, politically) i would never attempt to dictate
that one should use open standards or open source authoring tools in
creating one's work.

having said that, the reason that net artists are drawn to Java, Flash,
Director, HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc is that they are all
cross-platform technologies. net artists really don't want to lock
anyone out. they seem more concerned with this then most software
developers.

in my own work (except Flash of course) I try to follow W3C standards
when writing Web code (xhtml, css, javascript). i think it's the right
thing to do purely from a selfish perspective; if everyone is following
standards which aren't tied to any platform or company than the more
freedom we all have in choosing how to live and work in our digital age.

--
<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>

hm, didn't realize this had become a Mac vs. PC thing 'til now. I just
assume everyone hates MS haha. this tho i work in a windows-centric
environment.

more below:

On Sunday, June 15, 2003, at 10:16 AM, Jim Andrews wrote:

>
>>> I am against the forces of dullness and monopoly. But I am way for
>>> mind-blowing features that
>>> transform the mind and experience, transform the desktop into strong
>>> net integration. but in
>>> certain ways. not necessarily as microsoft would have it. more open.
>>> the feds can't just back
>>> off. they need to be concerned about this recent development where
>>> Microsoft and Apple attempt
>>> together to turn the browser into an OS-specific application. Not
>>> necessarily putting the kibosh
>>> on it, but keeping the possibility of other browsers--perhaps not
>>> OS-integrated, perhaps
>>> OS-integrated, as a possibility. That'd be their job to figure out
>>> what serves the societies of
>>> the world best, not Microsoft and Apple. I think as long as they
>>> continue to support various
>>> protocols that *are* supportable in other browsers, they will get
>>> their deeper browser-OS
>>> integration.
>>
>> I'm going to defend Apple as to compare MS and Apple is kinda wacky
>> imo.
>
> I see the issue as a cooperation between Apple and Microsoft, an
> agreement to back off each
> other's browser territory.

Apple has never made a browser for Windows so I'm not sure what this
means.

MS's statement that they can't compete on the browser on OSX means
either one of two things neither of which puts MS in a good light: 1)
they are admitting that if someone controls the OS than it's easy for
them to knock out competitors, the field isnt' flat, or 2) that was
just bs they made as an excuse to kill off part of the Mac BU at MS. as
i outlined in my last post Apple's browser implementation makes it
easier to compete in that area on Mac OSX.

>
>> there is a big difference btw the way Apple and Microsoft integrate
>> the
>> browser into the OS.
>>
>> First, there is a big difference btw the browser and the rendering
>> engine. the browser gives you all the features of web browsing like a
>> way to save bookmarks, kill pop-ups, delete cookies, and etc.
>
> there are windows popup killers. spy killers. spam assassins and
> knowbots. a scurvy lot, for the
> most part.
>
> and of course you can save bookmarks and delete cookies in IE for the
> PC.

i don't think you caught my meaning. the rendering engine does just
that, renders HTML, whereas the browser adds all the bells and whistles
around it. That's how all browsers work regardless of platform.

>
>> the
>> rendering engine is just part of the software.
>
> which software? the OS? or a separate renderer?

i was meaning the browser, the rendering engine is just one part of a
browser.

>
> there are various levels of access to CPU cycles, and different
> languages have farther to go
> through protocols and APIs between their requests and the CPU. the
> deeper into the OS you can
> get in the first step, the shorter the computation time. in short,
> renderers need all the juice
> they can get, and you get that with OS-integration.
>
> you also get security headaches because there's always some backdoor
> into the OS through the
> browser.
>
> Is OSX open source itself? I doubt it, somehow.

OSX's kernal, called Darwin (it's even been ported to pentium-class
processors
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6.0/release.html), is
open source (http://developer.apple.com/darwin/). the graphics layer,
Quartz, is not open source, but you can install other windowing systems
on OSX, like X11 (http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/X11/)
which is open source.

>
>> There are tons of ways
>> MS could have delivered basic web rendering (or even extremely
>> advanced
>> web rendering) to their OS w/out killing off Netscape.
>
> Microsoft did not engineer Netscape 6, which sucked. Netscape chose
> not to support their own
> layer tag and not to support a too wide range of the DOM. People came
> to hate Netscape 6 not for
> what Microsoft did to Netscape but what AOL did to Netscape. There was
> dev despair radiating
> illness in that browser. the netscape developers--their job had been
> to change the world. now
> they were working--or had since quit--for AOL and being tarted up and
> market-driven rather than
> engineering driven, and with a smaller team.

i agree Netscape 6 wasn't all that great. but it did have good
standards support. the issue was moot by the time it hit the street
anyway and it didn't help itself at all. they killed off the layer tag
because it's not a standard, that was a good thing to have happen.

i'm fairly certain that netscape supports the standard DOM. actually,
they make a pretty good case that they have the best support:
http://wp.netscape.com/browsers/future/standards.html (those charts
were creating using IE 5.5, 6 is a bit better)

>
> when marketing has too strong a hand in an engineering venture, what
> gets engineered is fantasy.
>
>> The rendering engine, Webcore, is open source on OSX and is one of the
>> most standards-compliant engines around. In fact, the guy who is the
>> main developer on Webcore has a blog where you can bug him about bugs
>> and chat with him about features. As opposed to Win/IE which IS NOT
>> open source;
>
> Yes, well, he isn't the only one on such a team, I hope.
>
> it's true that microsoft works behind closely guarded walls. they are
> proud paranoiacs.

which will be their eventual downfall, let us hope. vive la unix!

>
> but maintaining the integrity of source code is a big job, even bigger
> in open source. obviously
> it cannot be without certain flexible but sound security mechanisms so
> that code is accessed
> securely and reviewed by a larger team and is widely tested and
> refined in accepted engineering
> practice.
>
>> uses tons of proprietary tags;
>
> that isn't a problem unless developers choose to use them, knowing
> they are proprietary.

and they do, all the damn time!

> i used
> the innerHTML tag, which is not in the DOM but is supported to some
> extent, nonetheless, by
> Netscape 6 and 7 (though not in exactly the same way). why? it's a
> cool tag. did the stir fry
> texts with it (which don't run on the Mac either).

see! :-)

>
> the functionality of IE for the PC is pretty funky.
>
>> allows funky syntax;
>
> That is actually a virtue of it.

well no, it's not. it's a virtue for those who like to think that
Windows is the only platform. the lazy developer simply writes for IE
and tho it's crap code, it renders fine in IE, but it doesn't work
properly in other browsers. it could work properly if someone would
write it correctly.

>
>> and,
>> tho 6 is OK in this area, doesn't fully support some standards (CSS
>> and
>> PNG).
>
> Is there a PC browser as advanced as IE in its CSS support?

sure, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera (a chart detailing CSS support: (not for
the faint of heart)
http://macedition.com/cb/resources/abridgedcsssupport.html) and IE has
some serious problems with CSS support, the main one being lack of
support for position: fixed and if you don't include a doctype, it gets
the box model wrong (pain in the ass that one, 5.5 gets it wrong
regardless).

>
>> (and don't get me started on frontpage).
>
> I use Dreamweaver and notepad.
>
>> There is already
>> competing browser which make use of the rendering engine (Omniweb) on
>> OSX and the way Apple has structured it in the OS it will be extremely
>> easy for almost anyone to make their own browser. Their not killing
>> any
>> competition, they're encouraging it.
>
> t.whid, you are not aware of the IE Active X control that developers
> can insert into their
> applications. This control allows developers to do just what you are
> describing on the PC and
> has been around for quite a while: since IE 4--that was a big part of
> OS-integration--so that
> the system always had a OLE compliant Active X control for whatever
> application wanted one at
> run-time.

no, i'm well aware that it's very simple to imbed IE into applications
on Windows. tons of apps use it.

so why did they have to kill off Netscape? why not simply have this
available as an OS feature for developers? why not open up the code?

it's a very different thing to have open source Webcore on OSX as part
of your application than to have the closed imbedded IE. if MS decides
to change something in IE that fux yer app what are you to do? in the
open source world you simply change the code to the way you like it and
start distributing it with your code instead of the one that has
changed.

>
>> I think it makes sense to have web rendering built into the OS. It's a
>> service of the OS like any other, like, it would be weird if you
>> needed
>> a 3rd party app to print to a laser printer, ya know?
>
> i agree. also, as net.artists, we do have an interest in OS-browser
> integration.
>
>> And yea, Apple has a monopoly over the Macintosh platform, but that's
>> like saying Ford has a monopoly on Thunderbirds.
>
> Not at all. There are other Mac browsers, are there not, made by
> private companies? Same
> principle as with Microsoft, only on a different platform. Clearly it
> isn't the case though that
> the same logic applies to Internet Explorer and the Windows platform.
> Ooooohhhhh no. It walks
> like a duck and it talks like a duck, t.whid. Mac is a smaller duck,
> but a duck no the wat.
>
> What we are witnessing is a change in the perception concerning
> OS-browser integration from 97
> to now. people can see now that those browser controls being
> insertable into applications is an
> important possibility in *meaningful* integration of the net into the
> desktop. This is true for
> the Mac and Windows. i'm not sure how separable the IE renderer is
> from the browser in the
> Active X control. Quite, I would think, given how you can get rid of
> all the browser chrome in
> IE onscreen.
>
>> thanks for chatting about the geek stuff Jim.
>
> what i've argued above, t.whid, is that just about all of the features
> you mention that are in
> OSX are also in Windows 98 and IE 6.

>
> i think you're mistaken to defend Apple and censure Microsoft when, in
> fact, they are doing much
> the same: building OS-integrated browsers that will be unique on their
> respective platforms in
> their role in the desktop. and of course they will probably work
> fairly closely together, as
> they historically have on various projects, including browser
> technology.

tho they are doing similar (not the same thing as the open source
nature of Webcore makes Safari radically different from IE) things, the
practical effects are widely different. I've outlined how Apple's
browser implementation encourages competition where Microsoft's
destroyed competition on Windows.

Microsoft has a monopoly on a commodity: desktop operating systems.
Apple doesn't. If Apple had 97% of the market for desktop OS's many of
their tactics would be illegal and dirty, but they don't, MS does and
almost all their tactics are dirty and i would argue illegal.

maybe Chris Fahey can join this discussion, he's a Windows user, he's
sold out to Satan ;-)
--
<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>

>
>
> I am against the forces of dullness and monopoly. But I am way for
> mind-blowing features that
> transform the mind and experience, transform the desktop into strong
> net integration. but in
> certain ways. not necessarily as microsoft would have it. more open.
> the feds can't just back
> off. they need to be concerned about this recent development where
> Microsoft and Apple attempt
> together to turn the browser into an OS-specific application. Not
> necessarily putting the kibosh
> on it, but keeping the possibility of other browsers--perhaps not
> OS-integrated, perhaps
> OS-integrated, as a possibility. That'd be their job to figure out
> what serves the societies of
> the world best, not Microsoft and Apple. I think as long as they
> continue to support various
> protocols that *are* supportable in other browsers, they will get
> their deeper browser-OS
> integration.

I'm going to defend Apple as to compare MS and Apple is kinda wacky imo.

there is a big difference btw the way Apple and Microsoft integrate the
browser into the OS.

First, there is a big difference btw the browser and the rendering
engine. the browser gives you all the features of web browsing like a
way to save bookmarks, kill pop-ups, delete cookies, and etc. the
rendering engine is just part of the software. There are tons of ways
MS could have delivered basic web rendering (or even extremely advanced
web rendering) to their OS w/out killing off Netscape.

The rendering engine, Webcore, is open source on OSX and is one of the
most standards-compliant engines around. In fact, the guy who is the
main developer on Webcore has a blog where you can bug him about bugs
and chat with him about features. As opposed to Win/IE which IS NOT
open source; uses tons of proprietary tags; allows funky syntax; and,
tho 6 is OK in this area, doesn't fully support some standards (CSS and
PNG). (and don't get me started on frontpage). There is already
competing browser which make use of the rendering engine (Omniweb) on
OSX and the way Apple has structured it in the OS it will be extremely
easy for almost anyone to make their own browser. Their not killing any
competition, they're encouraging it.

I think it makes sense to have web rendering built into the OS. It's a
service of the OS like any other, like, it would be weird if you needed
a 3rd party app to print to a laser printer, ya know?

And yea, Apple has a monopoly over the Macintosh platform, but that's
like saying Ford has a monopoly on Thunderbirds.

thanks for chatting about the geek stuff Jim.

--
<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>

Hi everyone,

we're having a show over the summer which opens in July and we would
really like to send you a postcard for it.

Please send us your land address OFFLIST and we'll mail you a postcard
for the show.

Remember, send them OFFLIST. if you hit reply to this message make
certain that the email address is twhid@mteww.com and NOT
list@rhizome.org.

hope to get a bunch, c-ya
--
<t.whid>
www.mteww.com
</t.whid>

On Saturday, June 14, 2003, at 05:10 PM, Jim Andrews wrote:

> thanks, t.whid.
>
> 'I don