Re: Crawling info displays and slide shows

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 93 18:44:14 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9309292344.AA19758@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: sanders@bsdi.com
Cc: Charles Henrich <henrich@rs560.cl.msu.edu>, Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>,
        www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Crawling info displays and slide shows 
In-reply-to: <9309292200.AA22139@austin.BSDI.COM>
References: <9309292200.AA22139@austin.BSDI.COM>
X-Md4-Signature: 98d04de5f0de371d03d0bb3113b9b9a8
Tony Sanders writes:
> > want is a general way to "play" this sort of program to any readers
> > who want to click on the relevant start button.
> Define a new Content-type: (e.g., www/slideshow)

Ack!  application/x-www-slideshow

> Something along these lines would be a start.  This steals a bit from
> /bin/sh syntax.  You could *almost* do this today with xmosaic :-)
> 
>     .mailcap:   www/slideshow; /usr/local/bin/mosaic-slideshow %s

That would work today, if mosaic-slideshow were smart enough to fire
off a Mosaic session (or find your running one) and send appropriate
signals.  Of course, you could also use application/x-csh (see
previous msg from me this afternoon) and just use a standard shell
script with echos, kills, and sleeps.

BTW, I'm going to adopt somebody's (Charles's?) idea and have Mosaic
write its pid into $HOME/.mosaic.pid upon startup to make this all
easier to pull off.

>     .mailcap:   www/slideshow; mosaic-internal-reference

That would work only if/when we build slideshow capabilities into
Mosaic, which may happen (I'd love to see it) but which would require
someone to write a solid spec for this sort of thing...

Cheers,
Marc