Technology requirements in browsers

[Nick Barnes]

At 2006-03-02 00:42:50+0000, Damien Miller writes:

> I won't presume to tell developers how to spend their time, but please
> make it clear in the relnotes when you drop support for Lynx so I can
> look for another bug tracking product.
> 
> The ability to search & edit bugs, download or upload files, etc.
> directly from a Unix system where development or testing is taking place
> is simply too useful to discard.

I have considerable sympathy for this point of view, but from a
different direction: in testing the P4DTI we use several of the
Bugzilla interfaces from a python script.  This is easy as long as it
is possible to get basic Bugzilla functionality from any program which
can talk HTTP.

The underlying requirement here is to be able to obtain data, and
perform actions, from a simple script on a remote machine.  The
current method we use is to craft simple HTTP requests, and to use an
XML parser to suck data out of the resulting pages.  Any other
similarly easy method would suffice for us.

CSS is probably not a problem, because (I suspect) it would only be
used for rendering.  In fact it might well make it easier for us, by
allowing us to pick elements out based on div tags and id attributes.

As for ECMAscript, that all depends.  As Bugzilla moves down the road
to AJAX, sooner or later third-party scripts are going to have to do
XML/RPC, to "look like" an embedded ECMAscript widget.  That might be
OK, but we would like it flagged up well in advance.

Nick B