> We are involved in some work on safe Tcl which will become part of
> active email under MIME. [...]
> It would be a good candidate, IMHO, for delivering active HTML messages
> (i.e. programs) that can be executed safely, even though the sender
> isn't trusted.
Something I would like to see is libraries (I don't know if you have
them or not). They could be specified through MIME, I guess, and
would be a combination of ID and ``place to get them from if you don't
already have them''. For instance, say I want interactive hypertext,
I could use a set of libraries that have already been written and
debugged, rather than including the same code in every single
interactive hypertext document.
This would lead to:
-- standardisation of code (a Good Thing). C is intelligable
because libc.a provides a common set of ground rules without
which every program's source would bloat enormously.
-- local copies of libraries, to avoid repetitive and time-consuming
delays fetching libraries over a long-haul network for each
document.
-- quick boot-strapping. If a couple of useful libraries for text
and interactive graphics were available, more users would be
willing to start the gentle slope of the learning curve.
Nat.