Please accept my apologies.  I was completely ignoring the 'necessary 
and/or sufficient' and RTF line of thought.  To me 'lost' means 'became 
extinct', so in that respect, NeXT didn't "lose".  As far as the whole 
'success of Squeak' thing goes, I don't think I'm nearly as passionate on 
this topic one way or the other as other people are.

Regarding the whole RTF thing - RTF reading and writing would be nice, but 
this has been done 
(http://www.smalltalking.net/Goodies/Dolphin/Files/doRTF.zip, for 
example).  I think a valid area of discussion would be that while Squeak 
already includes richly formatted text capabilities, it can be quite 
difficult for new users to find 'the way in'.  The various tools have some 
pretty disparate interfaces and sparse documentation, and even an 
experienced Squeaker can find it a bit daunting reading through the code 
to figure out how to use it.  Is anybody interested in commenting on this 
idea?

                -Dean








Bijan Parsia <bparsia at email.unc.edu>
Sent by: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
12/18/03 11:57 AM
Please respond to The general-purpose Squeak developers list 

 
        To:     The general-purpose Squeak developers list 
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: [slightly OT]Re: rich text in Squeak


On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM wrote:

> Bijan Pasia wrote:
> >NEXT had RTF text widget support from the very start, plus a cool
> >Smalltalkesque development enviroment and...well...lost. I don't think
> the
> >RTF support mattered significantly either way.
>
> Pardon my digression here, but Mac OS-X would seem to refute the claim
> that NeXT "lost."  Probably the only 'significant' change is the
> substitution of Quartz for Display Postscript.

You're kidding, right?

The change was being bought by a vastly huger company with an enormous
installed base, and the top down imposed change, a very large rewrite of
big chunks, plus a migration strategy for old code. Plus, a big ole
marketing campaign. I seriously doubt that RTF had a bit to do with it.

I think MacOSX backward compatibily is a pretty freaking huge change.

If Squeak is picked up by Microsoft and imposed on everyone as the future
of Windows, then I'm sure we'll win too. In some sense. But not with the
mere addition of RTF!!!

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.




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