News in 2.0

[William Shipley]

If Alexandra accepts WebStep URLs, it'll take maybe 15 lines of code to  
write a bundle that handles "news:" urls by fobbing them off on  
Alexandra.  I can't promise I'll write those 15 lines myself but I know  
someone will as soon as we get the header files published (which I'm not  
going to attempt to do until I actually ship 2.0).

I certainly envy anyone who doesn't have to make money on software.  If  
I had infinite resources I'd spend all my time writing software I wanted  
to write instead of software people paid me to write.

On another subject, here's an interesting thing to think about: Netscape  
has 151 employees, is valued at something over 3 billion dollars, and  
has about 85% of the web browser market, and to date has only released  
web products.  Omni has under 20 employees, probably isn't worth 3  
billion dollars, doesn't have nearly that kind of market share (except on  
NEXTSTEP machines, maybe), and also does a lot of consulting and has  
developed OmniImage, OmniPDF, and OmniStill, and ported Framemaker and  
worked for Lighthouse.

Yet, OmniWeb 2.0 supports almost everything Netscape 2.0 supports:  
colors, font sizes, backgrounds, frames, tables, etc.  Sure, we don't  
have a built in newsreader or mailer (nor do we think a web browser is  
really the right place for one), but still, we think we're doing pretty  
well.

-Wil