[..deletia...]
Yes, this way of passing state information might be innovative, but not
especially elegant. I have therefore suggested that such information can be
passed as an attribute to the anchor (for example called STATE). here is a
quick example based on the Web Forum service mentioned above:
<A HREF="http://rohan.sdsu.edu/cgi-bin/terjen/bb/browse"
STATE="forum=infosandiego&ids=16018252%5F617">InfoSanDiego Discussion</A>
Following this, here is a similar extension that I've used in the past
on a modified browser locally. The idea is that if the server wanted
a "session-id", it would send a special tag in a form to the browser.
The browser would then "fill in" its "session-id" when the form is
submitted to the server. For example, the server would send
<FORM HREF="http://www.twinsun.com/cgi-bin/form" METHOD=POST>
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="SESSION-ID">
...
<INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" NAME="SEND FORM">
</FORM>
and, when the user clicked on the submit button, the client would send
session-id="12345@client.twinsun.com"
as part of the data part of the HTTP query to the server.
I used a hidden field with a distinguished name, but perhaps it would
be better to use a new type of input field.
The value of a "session-id" would be a unique string that is unique to
the instance of the browser. Under Unix, this could be some function
of the process identifier.
This feature would be used in conjunction with encoding state in the
URL.