>>>The necessary APIs are already published
MS will now have a second set of APIs. Those APIs necessarily exist - they have a very big team working in various cubes, offices, buildings and facilities, people are writing DLLs that are being linked to by other parts of their system, and Microsoft will have documented them for internal consumption.
These are the DLLs and their APIs that allegedly cause problems when removed from the system. These are the DLLs and APIs that allow you to click on a URL line in Exchange client, VC++ doc display, or Word, and launch the networking and browser to connect to that URL. These are the DLLs and APIs that allow you to install your browser and substitute its GUI for the generic Windows GUI.
These DLLs will have been broken down into separately installed modules (what a Dynamically Loadable Library is, actually), each with a function call list and parameter documentation for those calls for that library that makes it possible to use inside Microsoft.
They can simply publish the subset of those that makes it possible for another browser to function on an equal footing inside Windows. If they wish, they can split the calls into a set of DLLs that needs to be public, and a set that they will call part of IE, and will re-segregate from the OS.
This is not brain surgery. DLLs and similar schemes were in fact invented to make this kind of modularization easier to do. What they put into the Word or console or fileio DLLs to 'integrate' this function set can be extracted function call by function call if necessary. But I don't think that is needed. Because this stuff at this moment in time (Win95/IE4) gets installed when you install IE. So obviously they know what the parts list is.
Chaz
P.S. The 'alleged' secret APIs are not just alleged. I suggest you do the following experiment as part of your CS education. Buy one of the books on 'Windows secrets' and make the function calls documented in the book. If your program links and runs that function, and that function is not found in the appropriate documentation from Microsoft, then you have 'discovered' a secret API. Then go to the program the book claims uses it, look at it's assembly, and find out if it uses the same call. If it does, you have proven that Microsoft used a 'secret' API. |
