Re: Forms support in clients

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Tue, 27 Sep 1994 02:44:06 +0100

Well. I never intended to start a flame war, nor indeed a war about
languages. More than anything else, I'd like to see *forms* be
dynamic, or more precisely, over what is sent to the server.

SGML (of which HTML is one particular use),
is *great* for WWW, and I would hate to see it replaced by a full
scripting language *now*, because on the horizon (10 years maybe) we
have distributed object systems which are *far* better than sending
nice little "candy-grams" (as one repondent calls them).

I should not ethat about 3 years or so ago I *did* implement a system
based on the "candy-gram" model. It was a full cooperative,
distributed environment, and we solved the security problems primarily
via virtual machines and instruction set limitations. This system was
*very* nice; there were not so much client and servers as "peers"
working together. The emergent behavior in some cases was
interesting....

Sadly, I *cannot* give out details, and the system will probably *not*
get out from underneath the politics and misunderstanding above it...

That work was *not* EBT, and no, EBT doen't listen to me, so my
opinions are meaningless to them... :-)