Crawling info displays and slide shows

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 16:07:46 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9309272107.AA03864@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: Richard  Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Crawling info displays and slide shows
In-reply-to: <9309272041.AA11967@dxmint.cern.ch>
References: <9309272041.AA11967@dxmint.cern.ch>
X-Md4-Signature: 9b512ef35471fed89b317ff2e40d63d5

Richard  Wiggins writes:
> Last night, while watching the public information channel our university
> offers through the local cable TV company, I was thinking it would be
> nice to offer that same info via our CWIS. (The content is a mix of
> campus events, new programs, phone numbers, scenes of campus, etc.)
> Since this stuff is probably typed into a proprietary display tool on an
> Amiga somewhere, I'd have to convince someone to retype the info into
> another medium, or someone would have to develop a tool to export from
> the proprietary display engine to another form.
> 
> But it occurs to me that maybe the opposite approach could be taken. Has
> anyone looked into providing this sort of "crawling" display and/or
> slide-show displays via World-Wide Web? Ie rather than expecting the
> user to click on a choice, the document includes a URL to fetch next,
> and a timeout to wait before fetching it. To completely simulate the
> type of display I'm talking about, you could even give the client a type
> of transition to do between screens -- a dissolve, or a page turn, what
> have you. (I know, this gets into presentation issues, anathema to
> some.)
> 
> With this sort of functionality in HTML and with specialized client
> software, you'd put all this information in your CWIS, and you'd have
> the TV station broadcast a feed from the CWIS, instead of working the
> other way around. But the show would also be available for anyone coming
> in over the net as well -- one effort serves both needs.
> 
> Please forgive me if this has already been addressed -- hard to keep up
> lately.  Anyone already doing this sort of thing?

Mosaic for X 1.x (and even moreso in the coming 2.0) has related
"remote control" capabilities that quite a few people have used to
implement "slide shows" -- shell scripts that tell a running Mosaic,
via signals, to load various URLs at whatever intervals they want.
See
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/remote-control.html
for more details.

2.0 will enhance this by better handling multimedia data accesses and
by including scrolling/paging directives.

This gets close to what you're talking about, except that there's the
assumption a (shell/Perl/tcl/C) script is being run on the machine
with the client and controlling the client via "brute force" Unix
signals.  Would be nice to codify this into some standard,
transportable, transparent scripting mechanism...

Cheers,
Marc