This is my sense of the situation also. But I like to put a more
positive and optimistic spin on things.
Currently, Mosaic has become the sin-quo-non for WWW clients. It
has done such a good job at hiding the details of the web, gopher,
news, etc that a lot of high level mangagement and Buisness Week
writers only refer to Mosaic, and leave out mention of the WWW.
Ok, so that means there is tremendous pressure on NCSA to act
as the gatekeeper for client upgrades. Yes, they did not ask
for this role, but that is how it is developing.
There are techniques, ala Fresco and TK, for "seemlessly" folding
in active components into a WWW client. I see tremendous pressure
being taken off of NCSA, and a explosion of seemlessly added
features to the client - if we can only agree on a API for
allowing compound document inclusion into the Mosaic (and other
WWW clients).
It is definitely a win-win scenario.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Yechezkal-Shimon Gutfreund sgutfreund@gte.com [MIME]
GTE Laboratories, Waltham MA ftp://ftp.gte.com/pub/circus/home/home.html
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=