Today is 19 Jan 2002, and I'm writing an e-mail, completely offline. Soon I'll
connect to the Net, and post the e-mail to Arachne Mailing List.
Yesterday I looked at the arachne.cz, and the browser was still v1.70r3. I am
probably too impatient, but 22th January 2001 was the date of its release, and
22th January 2002 is not too far away.
A year, a year of hopeless waiting.
A year ago it was 22th January 2001 - 1.70 stable for DOS (CSS release)
revision 3. And it is still the last version to deal with. A dozen of bugs and
unsupported features, bugs in NOBR and PRE, semiimplemented CSS and DOM, dirty
titlebar and dirty transparent GIFs.
2 years ago it was 16th January 2000 - 1.60 beta 1 - "millenium pre-release",
no CSS, no [FRAME]BORDER, no VFAT, no Linux, bad OL, always QADT, and some
serious bug in security, so terrible that is was not even published when fixed
in v1.666.
3 years ago it was 24th January 1999 - 1.45 beta, a REAL beta, full of bugs,
bugs in FTP, bugs in table rendering, bugs in memory allocation, bugs in SMTP,
no GIF animation, no void table frames, no ACTIVE and no RESET input in forms.
4 years ago it was 15th January 1998 - 1.20 beta 7, which had nothing similar
to modern Arachne. No client-side imagemaps, no FTP, no 3d font, no TABLE
ALIGN, no REFRESH client-pull technique, no HiColor or PostScript, no mail
folders, nothing to deal with, nothing to write websites for. A webmaster's
nightmare.
5 years ago it was 27th January 1997 - 1.0 beta 4, which was rather a can of
bugs than a serious browser.
Recalling those four years, a great rush of continuous development, one could
expect Arachne 2, a cross-platform eye candy with W3C DOM, Javascript, ICQ,
graphical IRC, internal telnet, API for MIDI/WAV/video plug-ins embedded, not
only switching to APM. Several virtual screens to switch between them. Context
menus for hyperlinks. ALT and TITLE texts floating over images. And a dozen of
skin themes. Something like a fullscreen Netscape 6.2 for DOS, with
Winamp/mIRC/ICQ/DivX included, and fast. A webmaster's dream. And do not forget
CSS Layer 2! Absolute positioning rocks the Web.
One could at least expect Arachne 1.8, a piece of cake with no bugs, PRE
content correctly aligned in table cells, NOBR sections not inflated, DT
headings not numbered, and CSS 1 not so dirty. And gimmeasourcecode and I'll
make CENTER==MIDDLE somewherethere in HTML attribute parser!! ;-))
Joke. I know, in C/C++ it should rather be
// inserted in C if predicate list
... || (strcmp(HTML_Attribute_Atom, "MIDDLE")) ...
or even
...
// creating&inserting a new instance of HTMLArribute class
// into a IMGAttributes list for binary searches forthcoming
// in Arachne HTML parser...
IMGAttributes->Last.Next=new(HTMLArribute, Create("MIDDLE", NULL));
...
depending on how complicated is it inside Arachne source code.
Okay, I'll quit waiting.
Happy New Year to all of you folks!
BTW, though Gregorian Calendar was officially accepted by Soviet government
since 1918, our Russian Orthodox Church continues using original Julian
Calendar (you know, the beta release where "July" and "August" and short
February were introduced for the first time); so most of us (Russians) also
celebrated the 13th of January as our Old New Year holiday. Less than a week
passed, so I guess I still may wish you a happy New Year...
Fortunately it was also Sunday, a day off. Unfortunately, my Mithol.pp.Ru site
went down with the whole local network until 17 Jan 2002. A really stange
thing, because it is Latvia and not Russia where the server hardware is
located, and Latvian traditions usually differ ;-)) I hoped there would be
someone to press reset button...
Deeply yours,
M M
MM MM
M M M I T H G O L
M M http://mithgol.pp.ru/
T H E [EMAIL PROTECTED]
W W
W W W E B M A S T E R
W W W
W W
P.S. I've checked it before posting the email;
Arachne is still v1.70rev3.
