Re: Crawling info displays and slide shows

Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
Message-id: <9310040038.AA04007@dxmint.cern.ch>
Date:         Sun, 03 Oct 93 20:30:12 EDT
From: Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
Subject:      Re: Crawling info displays and slide shows
To: sanders@bsdi.com, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-Reply-To:  Message of Wed, 29 Sep 1993 17:00:26 -0500 from <sanders@BSDI.COM>
I want to be able to deliver a pageful of text to the user, and after a
timeout send the subsequent page.  If I follow this, you want to
relocate the functionality to the client side from the server.
Your scheme forces me to invent a new mechanism, whereas it seems
natural to me to want to deliver followon text after a timeout.  The
context isn't just slide shows per se; there might be all sorts
of situations where you'd want the client to go fetch a followon
URL -- for instance you might have an instructional "video" that
fetches one thing if the user selects an answer from a multiple-
choice menu; if the timeout period elapses, a "hint" page is
delivered instead.

I don't understand how this "clutters" the language.  Can't the
HTML document metaphor embrace temporal aspects?

/rich

>Define a new Content-type: (e.g., www/slideshow), then define the protocol,
>and then get browsers to support it.  Please Please Please don't clutter
>up the language with stuff that is more easily and better done externally.
>
>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
>or maybe
>    .mailcap:   www/slideshow; mosaic-internal-reference
>
>Content-type: www/slideshow
>
># www/slideshow example
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/audio/welcome.au &
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/welcome.html
>wait
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/audio/intro.au &
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/intro.html
>waitio		# waits until the user selects something from intro.html
>...
>
>--sanders