Fwd: Re: tigert's mockups and HTML

[Christian Hammond]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 01:20:17PM -0400, Patrick Patterson wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 September 2004 13:01, Sven Neumann wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Avery Pennarun <apenwarr at nit.ca> writes:
> > > Let's face it, there are no more desktops that don't have an html
> > > renderer *already* loaded.
> >
> > Can you back this up? I think you are wrong and I am sure that I can
> > back up my disagreement with lots of desktops on the computer screens
> > around me. Not everyone is browsing the web all day long or reading
> > HTML mail. Perhaps there's a HTML renderer I don't know about that
> > everyone has loaded already?
> >
> >
> I don't know - I've got 70 odd Linux desktops (30 or so are developers, 40 are 
> sales and Marketing folk) around here, and all of them have a browser open in 
> one of their windows, or preloaded behind the scenes (KDE Users).
> 
> And, since most file managers display a preview of documents as you browse 
> through, I'm going to guess that Nautilus has a rendering engine library 
> loaded somehow. Evolution and Kontact both render HTML mail, so they must 
> have a renderer loaded, and a large number of IM clients now do HTML.... And, 
> with most companies moving more and more of their services to web based 
> systems, this is only going to increase?
> 
> What are your systems running that they aren't doing Mail, IM, or Web 
> browsing?

I have clients running slow Linux boxes that have a minimal desktop
running. Browsers aren't used, the file manager is never really
touched, but there are programs running that could theoretically pop
up notifications. If we had to render each one, that would definitely
slow things down more. We'd have to load Gecko or something, let it
parse the notification and display it. Sure, that's not too bad,
right? How long does it take to render something? Well, a long time,
if something screws up and suddenly you have a thousand notifications
on the screen.

Say the disk goes back, as used in an example earlier on, and you get
a thousand notifications. The sysadmin or user would try to shut
things down and such, but now you have a thousand HTML renderers
trying to display the notifications. Ouch.

I don't think we need something so massive. A simple parser maybe, and
we could possibly include image support.. But that's another thing. It
would be so easy to abuse image support, even unintentionally, unless
we scaled it down or something. That's another discussion, though.

Christian
 
-- 
Christian Hammond         <>  The Galago Project
chipx86 at gnupdate.org      <>  http://galago.sourceforge.net/
   Smash forehead on keyboard to continue.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20040921/57fc8a9c/attachment.pgp