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In restrospect, that probably was a bit unclear. The good stuff is in the comments of the perl script, which lists all the problems with the format, includes links to the developer's explanation of the insane format and the bugzilla page suggesting doing something about it.

There's loads of things like this.

The rule of thumb I apply when looking for free/OSS solutions to an issue is:

"Does it fail the Groupware Bad test"?

ie. "Is it the kind of thing an individual (rather than a business) would have a need to develop?" If the answer is "no", chances are that very little in the way of Free/OSS solutions exists.

The good thing about the web, is that 6 year old fuel is just as good as today's, and sometimes it even matures with age...

Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War.
Jamie Zawinski

My opinion is that the best way to solve the technical issues is to mandate that the ASCII #9 TAB character never appear in disk files: program your editor to expand TABs to an appropriate number of spaces before writing the lines to disk. That simplifies matters greatly, by separating the technical issues of #2 and #3 from the religious issue of #1

A very clever solution indeed. Apparently some clever bastard sovled this issue six years ago. Return to your homes. Nothing left to see here.

Some freaky choices in categories sometimes

That'd be because the CDDB standards are totally braindead. Gogo musicbrainz, which sucks slightly less /o/ (although I've seen very few apps which support it D:)

Microsoft shouldn't have any problems starting a second Internet Explorer project to rewrite the entire codebase in C#.

The "Javagator" project - a parallel project at Netscape to completely rewrite Netscape Navigator in Java - is one commonly cited reason why Netscape failed.

There's some notes about that on this page.

Rich.

• Poor multi-language support
  
• Bits which sort-of work, mostly don't.
  
• Help files in a completely different language.
  
• Very poor community in terms of users and support. I think this guy has a point.
  
• (this is the real killer to the sales, marketing and management folks who are focused on appearance and functionality, with little concern about Microsoft), THEY DON'T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE OUTLOOK.
  

This goes back to what Jamie Zawinski said back in 1998. "Linux is only free if your time has no value." Sadly, years later it still holds true.
I agree completely.

# And Now, The Ugly Truth Laid Bare:
#
# In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a
# Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and
# pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been
# replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist.
#
# Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic.
# This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen.

#
# And Now, The Ugly Truth Laid Bare:
#
# In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a
# Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and
# pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been
# replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist.
#
# Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic.
# This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen.
#
# http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer. txt
# http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html
# http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html
# http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24143 8
#
# In brief, let's count its sins:
#
# - Two different numerical namespaces that overlap.
#
# - It can't decide what kind of character-quoting syntax to use:
# Backslash? Hex encoding with dollar-sign?
#
# - C++ line comments are allowed sometimes, but sometimes // is just
# a pair of characters in a URL.
#
# - It goes to all this serious compression effort (two different
# string-interning hash tables) and then writes out Unicode strings
# without using UTF-8: writes out the unpacked wchar_t characters!
#
# - Worse, it hex-encodes each wchar_t with a 3-byte encoding,
# meaning the file size will be 3x or 6x (depending on whether
# whchar_t is 2 bytes or 4 bytes.)
#
# - It masquerades as a "textual" file format when in fact it's just
# another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic
# numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable,
# so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines
# and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger.
# Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all.
#
# Pure comedy.

JWZ has some good information on RSI

I give Sun 3 years, max, before it's no longer a going concern.

I don't know if McNealy is the guy who could have saved Sun at this point, given his history at the helm, but I'm pretty sure that Jonathan Swartz is not the guy who can save Sun now.

I'm guessing the massive layoffs (cutting 10% to 30% of the workforce) will start no more than 1 or 2 quarters from now, probably within the next 6 weeks. And then will come a slow, awkward process of "realignment" and "improving core business processes" that will result in the following:

  * No more UltraSPARC machines. Sun will switch to selling all x86-64 machines on the hardware side, and will piss off its existing SPARC partners + customers in the process. It will probably waffle back and forth a few times in a vain attempt to both (a) keep investors and Wall Street happy and (b) keep customers and partners happy, but it won't work. They'll end up dumping the architecture sooner rather than later. Maybe Hitachi or some other big partner will end up keeping the architecture alive.

  * Solaris will become this decade's Netscape code - open-sourced, yes, and perhaps even maturing into a really cool and usable code base some years down the line - but Sun will botch up the relationship between its paid programmers, company management and the open-source coders working on the project during its unquiet slide into Chapter 11 or a takeover / buyout. Some bitter coder will write the equivalent of jwz's rant before it's all said and done.

  * Java will continue (it can't help but keep going, regardless of what happens to Sun), and might lose some favor in the eyes of suits, but ultimately, will do just fine without the company there. Most likely the Java codebase/IP/standards will get bought by some other interested party who wants to make themselves The Java King (IBM? BEA? Oracle?), and won't do any worse than what Sun has done with the language.

Sun in 2006 = SGI in 1997 = DEC in 1992. The writing's on the wall, I'm just impressed that they've lasted this long.

Ah well, more boxes to add to my pile of dying + extinct architectures. :)

Groupware bad.
Users good.

Groupware Bad

Of course, practically all of this is configurable nowadays, and cross-platform, too.

Hope that helps.

I really can't understand what is wrong with a simple text file.

Oh, there's nothing wrong with a "simple text file". It's just that there's like six different kinds of "simple text files" used by Mozilla. One of them is not "simple" either, it's really damn stupid, actually.

And Mozilla certainly doesn't use "simple text files". The moment you throw XML in it, it turns non-trivial. And as for Mork mentioned above, well, I challenge you to come up an "Art of Unix Programming" solution that's better than this.

Plus, as everyone who has programmed anything knows, "simple" text files, ultimately, aren't.

This will also almost certainly kill any chance of reusage of bookmark data by other programs

Au contraire, this will make reuse of bookmark data much simpler. Just load up your sqlite driver in your favorite scripting language and do a few SQL commands. Perl, Ruby and Python are already well supported.

I am delighted to see this. Some of the mozilla stuff still uses Mork, which is truly and utterly horrid. I recommend reading this delightful code by Jamie Zawinski, which has a brilliant rant about it:

This reminds me a interesting article JMZ wrote on the subject of groupware. It's worth reading just for the quote "How will this software get my users laid", but it's got some good points that are relevant here. I daresay Google's been reading it too.

With their talents and GMail's strengths, it looks like they're ready to come out with just what JMZ is proposing. Which may make Hula dead in the water, but we'll just have to wait and see...

That's because open source developers are sheep and their shepherd hates groupware.

Outlook supports integration with CRM tools (like Salesforce) that geeks hate but salespeople use very frequently. Because geeks lash out against CRM instead of creating open alternatives, Outlook wins by default.

Outlook also connects to an Exchange server to do file and calendar sharing more readily than Evolution does. Evolution's Exchange connector, when last I checked, uses an interface which mimics a web browser clicking through Outlook Web Access. Outlook uses the proprietary Exchange protocol and so is faster. Unfortunately, because geeks get all huffy about "groupware," work on an open alternative to Exchange proceeds at a glacial pace.

Outlook is seriously flawed in all the ways that you describe, but frankly I haven't found an open solution that is mature or feature-rich enough to replace it yet.

Let me highjack this for a moment and expand to the Windows platform -

Are there any decent calendaring applications that let me /subscribe/ to online calendars?

Plenty of programs will import iCal calendars (which seems to be the most popular format), but it's a one-time thing. I'm looking for something more like RSS - import what's there now, and check back on a regular basis for updates.

Importing isn't very helpful if I have to do it manually every couple days.

I think the time is ripe for a new kind of calendar application. Most calendars programs are pretty simple and assume there's just one person involved - you. The assumption is any event on the calendar is one that you are involved in. There's not much notation for differentiations like "This is something I'm doing" and
"This is something I'm interested in"

Here's a use case. I open my calendar program. I go to my custom views for "entertainment". I check out what movies are showing next week, what plays, what concerts, sports events, etc. I see my favorite band is coming to town, so I mark that entry. Now, if I go back to "my" calendar, I see that concert. Two days later, the bassist gets sick and the concert is postponed two weeks. When I open my calendar program, it alerts me that the event that I was interested in has changed.

Nothing I have found comes close to this. To be honest, most were just plain painful to use, and none had anything close to my dynamic calendars ideal.

There's some hope. Nat Friedman started the Hula Project last year (though JMZ had some reservations -- a good read, as Jamie's obversations usually are) which is open source and has the backing of Novell. I'm not sure if they've actually gotten anywhere, though; the open source landscape is littered with failed projects that started off as a code-dump from some major corporation. But at least someone seems to have the same idea and is trying to make a go of it...

>o how does this work out where every post I make as "anonymous coward" gets a 0 score and yet even the most basic comment (usefull or not) from any registered user gets at least a score of 2? Do all you registered /. users just use your points to vote for your own posts or what?!? ;)

ACs post at 0. Registered users post at 1. Users with high karma post at 2. The comment is then moderated higher or lower.

"Worse is better" refers to http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

also interesting:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

also interesting:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

Why wouldn't you download free screen savers from the Internet?

Is Mork to blame for the unscalability? This guy says yes...

Good point. But is *nix an operating system or a philosophy? Why has it spent the last 20 years losing market share to Windows? My guess would be that there are only so many people with the patience, curiosity and abstract reasoning to grok the philiosphy of "worse is better".

Asking someone to die because he likes Steve Jobs seems a little extreme, no?

Wozniak has come and gone, primarily because he made enough at Apple to live for the rest of his life in comfort. That was his motivation, and so he did it and now he's a schoolteacher. I can sympathise. Making high-tech products is a tough job. A lot of people who make their pile get sick of their tough jobs with little social interaction and go on to someone else. I'd consider JWZ to be another excellent example. He made his pile at Netscape, and he created the DNA Lounge, which I'm sure gives him as much of a social life as anyone would want.

Steve is a different type of guy. His single goal is to make Great Products. I don't think he's personally even that interested in selling them at a profit. The profit is means to an end, so he can make still more Great Products.

I'm typing this on a 17" PowerBook running MacOS X right now, and I can tell you, it is a Great Product. That's why I'm an Apple customer. Steve Jobs guides the technical people and makes sure they aspire to greatness instead of mediocrity.

I know in my own mind, as a technical person, how easy it is to say "Hey, this is good enough, let's go on to the next thing" instead of "Hold it, it's not great yet, let's do this and make it best in the world." I try to be my own goad, to make sure my product is the best. But it's hard and that's because Steve's role is hard, and necessary, in any company that wants to truly aspire to greatness, instead of creating stuff that's "just OK".

So few people make great products, because most people are willing to settle for lousy ones, like Windows or cheap PCs. But for those who love great products, and can afford them, it's Steve we have to thank, because he had the strength to demand only the best from technical people, including Wozniak.

D

The thing about Linux is historically, pretty much all the halfway-sensible end-user software that has stood the test of time in Linux has had a community (rather than just a company) behind it - and in many cases hasn't started from scratch, as a codebase was either already available or donated.

OpenOffice: check.
X: check.
Netscape: check. Though I dread to think what would have happened had it not been open-sourced.

Jamie Zawinski has penned a beautiful essay on how basically groupware, because it's not sexy, will never get a particularly enthusiastic community behind it. I'd extend this argument to say that any software which suffers from a similar problem will meet the same fate - and until Linux is sufficiently well-known on the desktop, you can forget about high-quality commercial offerings being made.

So, what kind of things does "suffering from a similar problem" extend to? Well, IMO one of the biggest things is polish - to usability, to functionality which has limited use outisde of a specific field. I'd argue that this is part of the reason that people still complain bitterly about the Gimp's user interface but very few actually try and do something about it.

The whole point of DTP is polish. To produce a document which isn't just useful, it's stunning. Without significant polish to a lot of things in Linux (not just a specific app - fonts immediately springs to mind), there simply will never be a particularly successful community-led DTP package. The only viable alternative is for someone like Adobe to support Linux more widely - not gonna happen, at least not until there's a wide base of people demanding it. And most of the base likely to demand it isn't going to use Linux in the first place, so there's a catch-22 right there.

Maybe that's [freeing their own memory] too much to ask of the sissy programmers coming out of school these days.

Are we sissy for not writing machine language still? Are we sissy for using libraries instead of implementing everything by hand?

Just because we can do something, does not mean it's best that we force developers to deal with that in every application they write -- because it'll usually be less efficient.

In a language without a GC (like C++), if you ask developers whether it'd be better with a GC, some will say yes and some will say no. In a language with a GC (like Python or Lisp), if you ask developers whether it'd be better without the GC, nobody would say yes. This to me is evidence that programmers who say they need a GC-less language only think they do.

Things that happen when you say 'X Windows':

I was digging through some old papers, and ran across a 15 year old "XNextEvent" newsletter, "The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User's Group", Volume 1 Number 2, from June 1988. Here's an article that illustrates how far the usage of the term "X Windows" has evolved over the past 15 years. (Too bad The Window System Improperly Known as X Windows itself hasn't evolved.)

Someone on slashdot asks, "Why is it still called X-Windows?". Predictably, the first reply says: "It isn't. It's called 'The X Window System.' Or simply 'X'. 'X Windows' is a misnomer."

He didn't ask why it is "X-Windows". He asked why it's called "X-Windows". You're wrong that it isn't called "X-Windows". It is! It's just that it isn't "X-Windows". Being something is independent of being called something.

The answer to the question 'Why is it still called X-Windows?' is: It's still called X-Windows in order to annoy the X-Windows Fanatics, who take it upon themselves to correct you every time you call it X-Windows. That's why it's called X-Windows.

The following definitive guide to the consequences of saying "X Windows" is from the June 1988 "XNextEvent" newsletter, "The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User's Group", Volume 1 Number 2:

Things That Happen When You Say 'X Windows'

THE OFFICAL NAMES
The official names of the software described herein are:
X
X Window System
X Version 11
X Window System, Version 11
X11

Note that the phrases X.11, X-11, X Windows or any permutation thereof, are explicitly excluded from this list and should not be used to describe the X Window System (window system should be thought of as one word).

The above should be enough to scare anyone into using the proper terminology, but sadly enough, it's not. Recently, certain people, lacking sufficient motivation to change their speech patterns, have fallen victim to various 'accidents', or 'misfortune'. I've compiled a short list of happenings, some of which I have witnessed, others which remain heresay. I'm not claiming any direct connection between their speech habits and the reported incidents, but you be the judge... And woe betide any who set the cursed phrase into print!

You are forced to explain toolkit programming to X neophytes.

Bob Schiefler says, "You should know better than that!"

The Power Supply (and unknown boards) on your workstation mysteriously give up the ghost.

Ditto for the controller board for the disk on your new Sun.

Your hair falls out.

xmh refuses to come up in a useful size, no matter what you fiddle.

You inexplicitly lose both of your complete Ultrix Doc sets.

R2 won't build.

Bob Schiefler says "Type 'man X'".

Your nifty new X screen saver just won't go away.

The window you're working in loses input focus. Permanently.

Things that happen when you say 'X Windows':

I was digging through some old papers, and ran across a 15 year old "XNextEvent" newsletter, "The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User's Group", Volume 1 Number 2, from June 1988. Here's an article that illustrates how far the usage of the term "X Windows" has evolved over the past 15 years. (Too bad The Window System Improperly Known as X Windows itself hasn't evolved.)

Someone on slashdot asks, "Why is it still called X-Windows?". Predictably, the first reply says: "It isn't. It's called 'The X Window System.' Or simply 'X'. 'X Windows' is a misnomer."

He didn't ask why it is "X-Windows". He asked why it's called "X-Windows". You're wrong that it isn't called "X-Windows". It is! It's just that it isn't "X-Windows". Being something is independent of being called something.

The answer to the question 'Why is it still called X-Windows?' is: It's still called X-Windows in order to annoy the X-Windows Fanatics, who take it upon themselves to correct you every time you call it X-Windows. That's why it's called X-Windows.

The following definitive guide to the consequences of saying "X Windows" is from the June 1988 "XNextEvent" newsletter, "The Official Newsletter of XUG, the X User's Group", Volume 1 Number 2:

Things That Happen When You Say 'X Windows'

THE OFFICAL NAMES
The official names of the software described herein are:
X
X Window System
X Version 11
X Window System, Version 11
X11

Note that the phrases X.11, X-11, X Windows or any permutation thereof, are explicitly excluded from this list and should not be used to describe the X Window System (window system should be thought of as one word).

The above should be enough to scare anyone into using the proper terminology, but sadly enough, it's not. Recently, certain people, lacking sufficient motivation to change their speech patterns, have fallen victim to various 'accidents', or 'misfortune'. I've compiled a short list of happenings, some of which I have witnessed, others which remain heresay. I'm not claiming any direct connection between their speech habits and the reported incidents, but you be the judge... And woe betide any who set the cursed phrase into print!

You are forced to explain toolkit programming to X neophytes.

Bob Schiefler says, "You should know better than that!"

The Power Supply (and unknown boards) on your workstation mysteriously give up the ghost.

Ditto for the controller board for the disk on your new Sun.

Your hair falls out.

xmh refuses to come up in a useful size, no matter what you fiddle.

You inexplicitly lose both of your complete Ultrix Doc sets.

R2 won't build.

Bob Schiefler says "Type 'man X'".

Your nifty new X screen saver just won't go away.

The window you're working in loses input focus. Permanently.

Well, Now we don't have to worry about jwz porting xscreensaver to windows!!!

xscreensaver

win-xmatrix, here I come!

/didn't rtfa
//don't run windows
///oops, wrong site.

Think! The _point_ is that if Linux is running instead of a screensaver, then you can finally run XScreenSaver on Linux on Windows!

It's only fair. After all, Windows has been running as an X11 screensaver for years (just invoke the BSOD module of xscreensaver).

to use this, would be to in effect run Xscreensaver on Windows! Using XP, I really miss those. And they will never be ported.

Once you have the idea on how sucky Mozilla's history stuff is in practice, take a look at how the stuff is actually stored in history.dat. People have been rendered insane by just a single look at that stuff. Want to make sense of this format for some obscure reason? Read this and weep. This stuff is just about the most insane thing I've ever seen.

I sure hope Mozilla folks get the unified storage plans together for Firefox 2.0, and use something like sqlite to store most of the user data. MorkDB format used by Mozilla is... just not elegant.

Good Lord, why isn't Netscape dead yet? Can't the authorities see that AOLTW is keeping them in constant pain and misery? I mean, good grief this is awful.

People whine about corporations having all rights of humans but no responsibilities; I don't want to discuss the ethics of euthanasia what comes to humans, but bloody heck, someone ought to legalize corporate euthanasia.

Getting users laid

Ted Nelson might be a little obscure in his words, but how about you try to explain an interface that implements this which hasn't been made, yet.

IHMO *those* are the very both reasons why Ted is doomed to obscurity. From the interview (yes I have RTFA) he seems an awful speaker (not just a little obscure). When asked how his system would differ from the already familiar WWW hypertext, he's unable to explain how will this software get his users laid. It doesn't help that there's no working system so that others can learn by example what is it useful for. (I said all this elsewhere in other words...)

It now has the added difficulty of trying to supersede a trivially simple system which is in widespread universal use. He's a victim of the Worse is Better principle acting again!

(I forgot, again, to check "use txt"...why isn't it default dammit...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all?
And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...)
http://hula-project.org/
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now
Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc.
Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust...
I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this.

But back on topic.
I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P
However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention.
(BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

Funny...we're thinking about the same thing: recently I've realised that adress http://calendar.google.com/ (as opposed to http://boo.google.com/ for example) is actually configured on their server and working, although right now it points only to their search site. Could they be preparing for something? :) I mean...why configure the adress at all? And half a year ago I mailed Google with proposition that they can perhaps do something like Hula http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html (worth reading IMHO...) http://hula-project.org/ http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005 http://nat.org/2005/august/hula.html - how it looks now Hmmm...easy webcalendar, with parts made "public" so other people can see what you're planning partly, and integration with Gmail to announce something automatically to others/retrieve their calendars/etc. Another feature that isn't mentioned anywhere and would be great IMHO - some kind of collage of few webcalendars (of others) on one, yours, so you can adjust... I actually submitted this recently to /. but it got rejected...oh well, fvck this. But back on topic. I should say "ignore me", I remember suddenly that on my own computers I haven't had acces to the net through most of last year :P However...I DID noticed extremelly high, compared to previous times, email usage on my part...I guess thanks to something that Gmail done right and you probably mention. (BTW, too bad I never played with IMAP really...but I haven't stumbled upon any free provider that I know wouldn't suck and any client for that matter...but when you think about it, Gmail is conceptually very similar to IMAP...)

Linux will get periodic random blue screens if you install xscreensaver with the bsod module. (Or, it may randomly be a Sad Mac or Guru Meditation)

Also bear in mind that bitching and moaning is one of Zawinski's favorite pastimes. Or is that two pastimes?

I first heard about Burning Man back in 1997 as an undergrad. Seemed really cool to a kid in rural southern Illinois. I thought about going out there after I got some money together. A couple of years later, I had the money, but not the time. Now I have the time and the money, but from what I've heard Burning Man is a shell of what it used to be. Control of photography that would put Walt Disney to shame. And everywhere I read about burning man now, I get an impression that there's general sense of malaise about the whole thing.

Are you saying that's not true? Because I don't want to go to something after it's already jumped the shark.

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/burningman.html

---

Actually, he's pretty much right on. The organization lies to the media & lies to attendees. It's nothing more than a huge cash cow for Larry Harvey & his pack of wannabe progressive idiots. "free society" my ass. There are more rules & regulations at Burning Man than you can shake a stick at.

Burning Man Corporation are a bunch of thieves.

If you have any images of nudity or drug use at Burning Man, expect a call from Burning Man Corp.'s lawyers. Unless you're registered as a "pro photographer", you are forbidden from publishing pictures. If you *do* register as a "pro photographer", you're required to give them copies of all of your photos for promotional use, and give them 10% of any money you could make from your photos, *and* they still get to decide what you can and can't show.

Now THIS is funny - from the File::Monk man page:


THE UGLY TRUTH LAID BARE ^

Extracted from mork.pl

In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist.

Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic. This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen.

              http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer.t xt
              http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html
              http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html
              http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438

In brief, let's count its sins:

        * Two different numerical namespaces that overlap.
        * It can't decide what kind of character-quoting syntax to use: Backslash? Hex encoding with dollar-sign?
        * C++ line comments are allowed sometimes, but sometimes // is just a pair of characters in a URL.
        * It goes to all this serious compression effort (two different string-interning hash tables) and then writes out Unicode strings without using UTF-8: writes out the unpacked wchar_t characters!
        * Worse, it hex-encodes each wchar_t with a 3-byte encoding, meaning the file size will be 3x or 6x (depending on whether whchar_t is 2 bytes or 4 bytes.)
        * It masquerades as a "textual" file format when in fact it's just another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable, so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger. Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all.

Pure comedy.

And the data formats haven't changed that much since the days when Netscape was the dominant browser.

Actually, it has, at least the URL history is in a completely different format in Mozilla derivants.

The format is called Mork, and is described as the single most brain-damaged database format ever devised. JWZ cried tears and blood when trying to write a separate parser for it. I can definitely understand the frustration of digital forensics people with this one: A file format that is not really encrypted, just obfuscated beyond all sanity.

Last I heard everyone wanted it to be replaced by sqlite. =)

Not finished yet, but it might be something you're looking for...

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
http://www.nat.org/2005/february/#15-February-2005
http://hula-project.org/

Free account:
http://nat.org/2005/june/#Planet-Hula