Re: Server control over history?
Paul Burchard <burchard@horizon.gw.umn.edu>
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Date: Tue, 15 Feb 1994 15:33:22 --100
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From: Paul Burchard <burchard@horizon.gw.umn.edu>
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Subject: Re: Server control over history?
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Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com> writes:
> Another common case occurs with fill-out forms. Keeping a
> history of the successive stages of filling out a form, and
> the updates to that form by the server is of dubious value
On the contrary---I would like to disagree here.
> (it would only make sense in the context of
> a multi-level UNDO mechanism).
Exactly---but this sort of automatic unlimited UNDO capability is a
wonderful thing for increasing interactivity. The higher bandwidth
of interaction you want to achieve, the more useful it becomes.
At the Geometry Center, we have just released a suite of interactive
graphical WWW applications based on fill-out forms, and have found
the automatic UNDO capability to be *extremely* helpful. Given the
turnaround time of network transactions, correcting or fine-tuning
one's input by taking advantage of the transparent UNDO feature can
greatly boost the apparent interactivity of the application. (Try it
out for yourself at "http://www.geom.umn.edu/apps/gallery.html".)
I don't have anything against your proposal for "hints" that would
allow history to be discarded. I simply want to emphasize that the
default behavior of browsers should always be to *keep* intermediate
steps of the fill-out form.
Thanks for listening,
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Paul Burchard <burchard@geom.umn.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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