David:
"So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication."
So the official term for my ATOM feed is "Really Simple Syndication", is it?
ats:
And that's discounting the people who claim it stands for "RDF Site Summary". ;)
But needless expansion of acronyms is a fairly standard problem with news reporting -- I think they think it makes technology look less scary.
David: The survey data is suspect too. What odds are you giving on them not using the abbreviations in context? Then combine that with not being able to tap them into Google to find out what they mean, and you end up with a large number of people who might not know, but really don't care either.
David:
"Dillo is a very lightweight (about 350 KB) browser supporting a subset of HTML, CGI, SSL, and cookies."
A web browser that supports CGI? A web browser that supports a means for a webserver to get data from a program instead of a static file? Oh boy.
"Dillo is not really practical for browsing the modern Internet, due to missing support for frames, CSS, Javascript, and other commonly used standards and protocols."
The modern World Wide Web doesn't depend on frames, CSS or JavaScript. They're all supposed to be optional add ons. And most of the sites I read don't depend on them.
"It also appears to have only basic HTML error handling capabilities"
Yes, well, lets not put so many errors in? I don't generally notice dependancy on error recovery though so I really can't say how much impact this would have.
"lack robust support for anti-aliased text"
What a major problem. How did I survive all those years without AA text?
"Dillo is popular with web developers due to excellent HTML error reporting"
Yes, well, I'll settle for a valdator. That catches most errors and can be automated.
Reading more about this bug reporting I find that: 'Mainly, the parser catches "nesting" bugs. That is, improperly closed or unclosed elements.' ... so that's covered by the valdiator then.
"the chances of a dillo-validated web page to be W3C or WDG compliant are very high!"
Err. The WDG validator is just a validator (quite a good one though). If it passes a page then that page is not "WDG compliant", its compliant to whatever DTD is specified (and the WDG don't publish any DTDs AFAIK).
And why do they randomly write "Web" in ALL-CAPS?
ats:
I used to use Dillo a few years ago, and even did some development on it (I think my name's still in the credits somewhere).
My recollection of the code is that it would be extremely hard to extend it to make it useful as a modern browser.
And I'm not really sure what market it's aimed at -- embedded devices these days have silly amounts of computing power, and real browsers like GTK-WebCore and Minimo seem to have the market pretty much covered already.
I'm also deeply unconvinced about porting to FLTK -- FLTK is a cute hack, but it produces really bad GUIs.
(I think this sort of hostage-taking is extremely distasteful, by the way.)
David: This is good fun. I'll pick up a copy soon
Just got to wait for my budget to recover after I buy a new PC later this month