To: kcunning
Subject: Proposal for default OLH behavior on var. platorms
FCC: ~/Mail/outbox
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Currently, there are three different options for OLH:

- Motif-based OLH, using the `external' viewers such as viewscribe,
  xdvi, and ezv.

- Motif-based OLH, using the `internal' text viewer to view the documents
  after they have been converted to plain ascii (as is done in the
  curses-based OLH).

- Curses-based OLH, which converts the documents in the OLH tree to plain
  ascii text to display.

Here's what I'd propose for the new default behavior of OLH across platforms
in light of these options:

I think the best option would be to have motif-based OLH be the default
on all platforms where Motif was available; the choice of whether or not to
use the internal or external viewers by default would depend on the
availability of EZ, and the speed of the platform.  Going across our current
platforms, this would translate to:

VSII		Motif-Int
VS2000		Motif-Ext
VS3100		Motif-Int
DS3100		Motif-Int	(move to motif-Ext when EZ is available)
IBM RT		Motif-Ext
IBM PS/2	Curses		(move to motif-Int when Motif is available)
IBM R/6000	Curses		(move to motif-ext as EZ/Motif becomes avail.)
Mac AUX		Curses		(move to motif-Int when Motif is available)

Several advantages to this:

  - Users see a much faster response by not using the external viewers.
  - The motif interface can be used on platforms where EZ is not available,
    since they can now use the built-in viewer on EZ documents (with the
    loss of the special formatting).

Several disadvantags

  - Different behavior on different platforms.  While this is not by itself
    desirable, the impact of this may be minimized.  Since the features are
    the same between the versions of OLH, and the basic interface to all the
    versions are (I believe) mostly intuitive, I don't see any large
    problems with users being able to adapt to using either version.
    Additionally, since they would be able to override the default and use
    whichever version they chose, it would not prevent those users who had a
    definite preference for a particular version from using it, regardless
    of what platform they are on.

Comments/opinions?  I'd like to send this off to Larry by the end of this
week/early next week.

	-Lucien