Re: W3A - update and questions
Steven Miale (smiale@cs.indiana.edu)
Sat, 30 Jul 1994 05:41:51 +0200
Bert Bos wrote in <9407141927.AA17909@freya.let.rug.nl>:
>Platform-independence:
>
> Viewers need to display their output in a window provided by
> the browser. Under X, it is easy to pass a widget as an
> argument to the viewer. Is there an equivalent datastructure
> under MS Windows, or on the Mac? Requirements are that the
> viewer is able to draw in it, maybe make sub-windows in it and
> make its preferences about the size of the window known to the
> owner of the parent window.
>
> How about a text-mode browser? The window argument will be a
> dummy, since there are no windows on a text terminal, or are
> there?
Why should this even be part of a W3A standard at all? It seems like something
the HTML browser itself should handle.
I'm working on a modularized WWW client, and handle this situation like so:
The html browser has it's own 'registry', a mapping of URLs to windows. When
a document comes in, it looks in the registry; if there, it sends the document
to that particular window. Otherwise, it creates a new window.
Similarly, if you want a particular URL to appear in a particular window, you
have to register it beforehand. No big deal; it's fairly simple code.
This seems more modular than having a window parameter passed on (IMHO, of
course.)
Steve