non-standard HTML? [Re: netscape to become freely redistributable]

Martin Maechler Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>
Fri, 23 Jan 1998 14:07:21 +0100


>>>>> "DougB" == Douglas Bates <bates@stat.wisc.edu> writes:

    DougB> I presume by now that most everyone has heard that, starting
    DougB> later this quarter with Netscape 5.0's developers' release, the
    DougB> Netscape browser program and its source code will become freely
    DougB> redistributable.  They didn't say it would be GPL'd (GNU Public
    DougB> License) but they said their source code would be available in
    DougB> the spirit of the GPL.

I did not know this.  Thank you for the information.
I *do* like it!

    DougB> Initially it bothered me that the start.help() function in R
    DougB> tried to find netscape on your system and started that to read
    DougB> the .html files.  I thought it might be better to rely on a
    DougB> freely available browser like mosaic or chimera2 or arena.  Even
    DougB> lynx would have been an alternative.  I find I still often use
    DougB> lynx for browsing when I am on a a machine with 8 bit planes of
    DougB> color because I don't want a bloated netscape eating up my color
    DougB> table.
ok.
That's why we use  
	netscape -install 
which keeps its own colormap.

    DougB> In retrospect the decision to standardize on netscape and to use
    DougB> their extensions to the HTML standards in the R documentation
    DougB> looks like a good one.

That's the paragraph which made me respond:

---> Which Non-HTML 3.2  Netscape-HTML extensions are we still using?

I've once looked a little bit at it and thought I didn't see any,
at that time.

I very much agree with Ross (and Tony Rossini and ...) that we would not
want to use non-standard HTML.

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