OT - Curl

[Christopher Barber <address@hidden>]

Scott Ribe <scott_ribe@killerbytes.com> writes:

> My viewpoint, extremely cynical I admit, but accurate I think: Curl is
> designed to be a commercial success by appealing to the PHB ITdiots who
> think that all applications should be stuffed into a web browser. 

The design of Curl was motivated by two observations: (1) web-development is
overly complex, requiring the integration of too many technologies and
languages (2) client-side technology makes better use of existing computing
resources.

I think that it is prettly clear that the existing HTML-based server-side
approaches are not producing good results.  In the last five years, web sites
generally have not improved in usability or performance, despite the fact that
the average desktop computer has increased greatly over the same period of
time.

> pretty confident that the people designing the language understand that if
> you have to make your users download a big honkin' runtime plug-in, you
> might as well make them download a client application and do away with the
> awful limitations and flakiness of the browsers.

You are right that the need to download and install the Curl plug-in is a
barrier to acceptance, but people seem to have no problem downloading Java,
Flash, Acrobat, Real Audio, etc.  The AOL client installation is also
notoriously large.

As to browser vs. standalone application: why pick one to the exclusion of the
other?  Also, despite their limitations, web browsers are quite useful in many
ways and most end-users are familiar with their use.

> Or maybe they hope to get enough momentum to become part of the standard
> browser distributions. I hope not, because I think the time during which
> that might have happened is long over.

That would have been nice, but it was never part of our plan.

- Christopher