Avi Bryant wrote:

>On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 11:24:38 +0100, Romain Robbes
><romain.robbes at lu.unisi.ch> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I already envisioned to customize buttons in the browser for example,
>>but the old browser is a bit of a mess to do that
>>(even if I did some refactoring when I issued the first version of
>>BrowseUnit).
>>    
>>
>
>Guys, isn't that the point of OmniBrowser?  I'm not sure how
>worthwhile it is at this point to try to do anything with the old
>system browsers.  It's significantly easier, in my experience, to
>extend OB, and I don't think it's unreasonable to simply decree that
>Services (or eCompletion, or Shout, etc) will only apply to
>OmniBrowser and the old browsers will continue to work as they always
>have.  Speaking purely as a user of those various packages, I would
>much rather see a well designed, well integrated set of tools that
>required OB, than a mishmash of over-generalized packages that try to
>be everything to everybody.
>  
>
Browser was one in a long line of tools and from KM's point of view no 
more or less difficult than any of the others (I ignored many of its 
idiosyncrasys just to get the job done).  Switching to OB will hardly 
alleviate the burden.  Obviously Romain feels differently but I don't 
think he has a point of comparison since he didn't try to migrate the 
other tools.  What we need is to decide how tools can register their 
actions (global services and application specific actions) so that KM 
and Services can manipulate them.  Once that is in place, migrating the 
existing tools to using this mechanism is really a one shot deal.  
Whether we worry about Browser or just support OB really doesn't have a 
big impact on that in my mind.  What I would prefer not to see, and 
maybe what your addressing, is packages like KM and Services which have 
tentacles (extensions/overrides) to support "non-compliant" tools.  I 
agree 100% with that but I think releasing KM without showing its impact 
on the tools would have given a lesser impression of the goals of the 
design.  The extensions, in my opinion, are throw away code...I accepted 
that when I started them.

>My EUR 0.02 (which is, what, about 7 american dollars these days?)
>  
>
Enough to buy an American beer, at least :-)

David