Re: messages from the WWW Library

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Date: Tue, 6 Jul 93 11:14:50 +0200
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9307060914.AA09325@www3.cern.ch>
To: Aleksandar Totic <totic@milton.cs.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: messages from the WWW Library
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
Status: RO

>From: Aleksandar Totic <totic@milton.cs.uiuc.edu>
>Date: Mon, 5 Jul 93 19:00:33 CDT
>In-Reply-To: <9307052243.AA19340@stat1.cc.ukans.edu>; from "Lou  
Montulli" at Jul 5, 93 5:43 pm
>X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]
>
>> 

>> What do you developers think about changing all of the informative
>> user messages that currently come out of the WWW library into some
>> sort of standard user_message call.
>> 

>I think that this is a great idea, especially in GUI environment  
where
>printf does not really work. The error messages are scattered
>all throughout the code, which makes them hard to modify for a
>particular platform. What I would also like to do is give user the
>opportunity to correct an error.
>

Agreed.  The module of user interface messages is already there in  
fact, ready to be overridden in the GUI case. It is HTAlert and
is described in
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Library/Implementation/HTAlert.html
There is now a link to this (to and) from the internals page.

Routines are

	HTAlert,		(warning)
	HTPrompt,		(user input)
	HTProgress,		(informational)
	HTConfirm		(message, OK/Cancel response)


>This would give programs that use the library flexibility we need so
>that we do not hack the insides of its code.


Precicely.  The problem is, not all the libwww code uses these
routines at the moment.

>Aleks

Tim