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unified API, the ability to drop plugins in for new file types, and for applications to actually unify around using a specific standard. There have been attemp
by nitrogen 5y ago
unified API, the ability to drop plugins in for new file types, and for applications to actually unify around using a specific standard.
There have been attempts, such as OLE and ActiveX on Windows, or KParts in KDE 2 (and dcop from Qt 2) (or was it 3?), or Intents on Android, or WebIntents, but yeah, none of them became universal, and many of them had security problems.
- vidarh 5y agoI think all of these illustrate part of the challenge: They're all tremendously complex compared to the basic functionality of datatypes. That is part of the problem with many of the attempts to do the same again. A lot of the constraints AmigaOS had to deal with became strengths in that these APIs had to be simple because they had to work on machines with memory measured in kilobytes or megabytes. Of course it's also more complex to do on a system where you expect security (no memory protection on Amiga's made that rather moot), but I think a targeted attempt to do just the minimum datatypes does - or even less, would still be valuable. E.g. many of the security issues are related to embedding a widget, but just providing a unified mechanism for loading and saving which could easily be sandboxed and interfaced to via a dumb pipe (still security issues in validating what's passed over that of course).