Misc. questions

[Ken Case]

> The first is related to the really annoying 'gray screen of
> death'.  I've observed that it happens more often when I rapidly
> open/close document windows, and it seems to be related to some
> release/autorelease race condition.

That definitely seems to be the case.  Basically, the view seems to  
be getting deallocated right after it's placed into the scrollview  
(and I'd really expect it to be retained by _someone_ at that point).

> I've read somewhere that OS4.2 and Rhapsody differ in some subtle
> aspects like freeing sub- and superviews; this might be the reason
> that the bug doesn't seem to happen on Rhapsody

I expect so.

> Is there any chance that the next version of OmniWeb will take
> care of this?

It's the top priority for the next release.  Actually, the gray  
screen problem seemed to disappear for a while internally (or at  
least happen much less frequently), but I suspect that was just due  
to some interaction with JavaScript--we certainly haven't actually  
fixed the problem directly yet.

> Another thing is more of an HTML question: if you visit
> http://www.objectshare.com/vwnc/ you'll see an empty white page.
> A <style> tag is followed by an unclosed HTML comment, effectively
> rendering the end of the style tag useless; this results in quite
> a lack of style. I have all Netscape comaptibility options
> checked, but that doesn't seem to make any difference.  Should
> I bug their webmaster about broken HTML?

Well, I always recommend to anyone that they complain to webmasters  
about broken HTML, but we'll also try to fix our style tag processing  
so that if it's unmatched it doesn't make the entire remainder of  
the file disappear.

> Finally, my last question is about how Omni sees the future of
> OW in immediate and short term. It's the best thing we have until
> OSX hits the street, [...]

We hope it'll be the best thing we have after OSX hits the streets,  
too!  I'm certainly looking forward to shipping OmniWeb on both  
mainstream end-user operating systems.

> but it's getting harder every day to use it productively, simply
> because of apparent incompatibilities, slow performance (which
> is really DPS'/AppKit fault), lack of Java (which is not OW's
> fault either), etc.

OS X will help the performance (goodbye DPS) and includes support  
for Java.  In your short list, that does leave the apparent  
incompatibilities--I guess we'll just have to continue to work on  
those.

(The incompatibilities which have bothered us most recently are when  
we're authoring web sites:  we find that the other browsers have a  
lot of HTML-rendering bugs which OmniWeb doesn't, which means that we  
have to make sure we test our web sites in the other browsers too.   
Mind you, we do still have our own areas of rendering which really  
need work, such as support for percentage widths in table cells.)

				Ken