Fat Pages are Our New File Format

Fat pages are our cross-platform file format. As you know, we're porting Frontier to Win32. We needed to change the file format for desktop scripts to be cross-platform. Windows files don't have resource forks. There's the problem we have to solve.

At the same time we thought it would be a good idea to include the docs in the files, and HTML is a great standard and everyone has a browser (we assume). It's a major step up from SimpleText readmes or Word readmes, and there's only one file. And, it also can be easily loaded off the net.

And, from my side of the equation, fat pages are much easier to manage. That means I can develop more software and spend less time updating the site (and making mistakes!). All the tools to build a fat site are available and free, so anyone else can have this economy too.

So, there are many answers to your question. Stay with the program, we've been putting up a lot of fat pages, eventually all the pieces of the standard root will be stored on those pages, including stuff written in AppleScript.

And fat pages will load into any version of Frontier, on any platform. Then of course comes the question -- how to run AppleScripts on Windows? I bet some people will want to do that.

Anyway, I, for one, think fat pages are a real win.

Dave Winer