Towards interactive Web standards...

Paul Burchard (burchard@horizon.math.utah.edu)
Tue, 7 Mar 95 16:14:23 EST

I've started some Hypernews pages on the issue of making the Web safe
for interactivity -- as a place to collect and organize some of the
diverse and insightful ideas being tossed about in this discussion.

I hope the active discussion will remain on these mailing lists;
this works well with Hypernews since it lets you annotate the
articles with pointers to (e.g.) your archived email messages.

Let me know if this is a useful service. The current URL is:

<URL:http://www.geom.umn.edu/hypernews/get/interactive/index.html>

Here's the first page, in text form:
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Towards Standards for an Interactive Web

Discussion page maintained by Paul Burchard <burchard@geom.umn.edu>.

You can add contribute to these HyperNews documents. References to
relevant articles in the HTML-WG or WWW-Talk archives are
especially encouraged.

The first phase of this discussion is about the design requirements
for various types of interactivity. The focus is on clarifying the
needs of applications, with minimal prejudice as to implementation.
Experimental implementations are nevertheless essential for revealing
additional design considerations. Each topic or subtopic contains:

* General reasons why this should be a design requirement.

* General reasons why this should NOT be a design requirement.

* Applications which are claimed to require this feature.

* Proposed or experimental solutions.

* Subsidiary issues to be resolved.

The classification and description of requirements will evolve as the
discussion proceeds.

Phase I: Evaluation of Design Requirements.

(Is this list complete? usefully categorized?)

* Client-side scripting.

* Framework orthogonal to document format.

* Framework orthogonal to scripting language.

* Client-side binary extensions ("components").

* Server-to-client callbacks.

* Session protocols (client-server or peer-to-peer).

* Complete range of GUI events.

* Use existing standard for event records.

* Prepackaged rubber-banding.

* Complete GUI layout control.


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Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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