Re: Local program exection in WWW browsers

Joe English <jenglish@crl.com>
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Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 19:20:59 --100
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From: Joe English <jenglish@crl.com>
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Subject: Re: Local program exection in WWW browsers 
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Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu> wrote:
> Presumably we want this interpreter to be able to interact with the
> WWW client after it is running.  Offhand, I can think of at least two
> new commands you would want the untrusted interpreter; one to send the
> client a URL and have it go to and display it, and one to send a MIME
> message (which may be a part of a multipart structure the program was
> enclosed in, or HTML built on the fly, or whatever) to the client to
> be displayed as though it were sent by a server.
> 
> Unfortunately this means defining a way to tell clients to do this.
> Obviously implementing this for TkWWW will be trivial, but most
> clients don't have any provision for this kind of stuff (and those
> that do often implement it poorly.)   [...]

This will be different for each platform, but for 
X-based browsers the selection mechanism might be 
a good approach.  The XHelp protocol is a good 
example of how this could work.

There are some disadvantages, though: only one 
browser could be "active" at a time (the owner
of the 'WWW' selection), and it might not be easily
implementable in Tcl/Tk without interpreter extensions
(at least the last time I checked, Tk didn't support
the full X selection mechanism, only PRIMARY selections.)


--Joe English

  jenglish@crl.com