|Bert Bos wrote in <9407141927.AA17909@freya.let.rug.nl>:
|>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
[...]
|Why should this even be part of a W3A standard at all? It seems like something
|the HTML browser itself should handle.
|
|I'm working on a modularized WWW client, and handle this situation like so:
|The html browser has it's own 'registry', a mapping of URLs to windows. When
|a document comes in, it looks in the registry; if there, it sends the document
|to that particular window. Otherwise, it creates a new window.
|
|Similarly, if you want a particular URL to appear in a particular window, you
|have to register it beforehand. No big deal; it's fairly simple code.
I've really tried to omit windows from the W3A API, but I can't find a
solution. I don't quite understand the paragraph above: the
browser is able to tell the viewer which window to use, but it
needs no new protocol for that? Can you explain?
The model in my head is:
- viewers are tied to Content-Type
- a particular instance of a viewer for a particular document is
tied to a particular window (the instance is discarded afterwards)
- the browser deals out screen space (rectangular areas within the
boundaries of which viewer instances can do what they want)
Steve, you seem to suggest that :
- there is only one viewer instance, which handles all docs of a
particular type (you say `URL' but that can't be right)
- its single window is registered with the browser by some means
outside of the program (you say `HTML browser', don't you mean
`WWW browser'?)
How can this deal with, for example:
- simultaneous display of two documents of the same type
- in-lined material
Bert
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