On Mon, May 01, 2000 at 03:37:26PM -0500, Billy Brown wrote:
> Martin Ling wrote:
> > ActiveX components are simply Windows executables. Making a runtime for
> > them would basically mean making a runtime to allow Windows programs to
> > run on other OS's. This is *not* a simple task, and not one Microsoft is
> > willing to allow (they refuse to document the APIs, hence everything has
> > to be reverse-engineered).
>
> What alternate universe are we talking about here? I know it can't be the
> real world, because I currently have on my hard drive a complete set of
> Microsoft documentation for pretty much the entire Windows API set. They
> don't quite give this away, but they come pretty close - it's only a couple
> hundred dollars a year for a complete subscription.
>
> Obviously they don't completely document every possible bug, side effect or
> unsupported call in existence, but that isn't because there is some
> conspiracy to keep it secret. Rather, it is because they only have so much
> money to spend on developer outreach. The information they do make available
> is far more complete that the docs I used to work with for Unix and Mac
> APIs, and about as good as I would ever expect to see for a product that
> changes substantially every few years.
The documentation you have is not complete.
It's certainly not enough to create an alternative environment in which
programs talking the Windows API could operate (please take us in
context - we were discussing the Wine project and such possibilities).
Michael pointed out, and I conceded, that it *may* contain enough to
write an environment capable at least of handling most ActiveX programs.
Martin
-- +--------------------------------------------------------+ | Martin J. Ling Tel: +44 (0)20 8863 2948 | | martin@nodezero.org.uk Fax: +44 (0)20 8248 4025 | | http://www.nodezero.org.uk Mobile: +44 (0)7940 482675 | +--------------------------------------------------------+
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