I still have some questions that I can't answer satisfactorily myself.
Surely somebody on this list is able to answer them:
Paths (guided tours):
HTML 3.0 will support `paths' and there are probably other
hypertext formats or slideshow programs that have a similar
feature. In W3A paths are not handled by the browser, but by a
viewer. That means that the documents on the path are
considered sub-documents of the viewer that handles the path.
Currently this also means that they will not appear in the
browser's history (if it keeps one) and that it is impossible
to add them to a hotlist.
Is this OK? if not, how can it be fixed?
Platform-independence:
Viewers need to display their output in a window provided by
the browser. Under X, it is easy to pass a widget as an
argument to the viewer. Is there an equivalent datastructure
under MS Windows, or on the Mac? Requirements are that the
viewer is able to draw in it, maybe make sub-windows in it and
make its preferences about the size of the window known to the
owner of the parent window.
How about a text-mode browser? The window argument will be a
dummy, since there are no windows on a text terminal, or are
there?
Distributed browsers:
It would be nice to be able to distribute the browser over
several machines in a network, running each applet on the
machine best suited for it. Is this worth the extra effort?
How easy and useful would it be, for example to re-specify W3A
in IDL and use CORBA services?
Synchronization:
A viewer for a compound document (such as a HyTime document)
can start sub-viewers to display the components of the
document. It can place them in their proper spatial positions
and it can start them approximately at the same time and it
can stop them again, but beyond that there is no
synchronization.
Should W3A specify a general `event' mechanism, whereby
viewers can register callbacks for a specific, abstract event?
E.g.,
W3AregisterEventCallback(void *type, HandlerProc proc)
W3AtriggerEvent(void *type)
Maybe we also need a clock? It's probably better not to
specify this yet.
Bert
--
___________________________________________________________________________
####[ Bert Bos ]####[ Alfa-informatica, ]####
####[ <bert@let.rug.nl> ]####[ Rijksuniversiteit Groningen ]####
####[ http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/ ]####[ Postbus 716 ]####
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