Re: Crawling info displays and slide shows

Rich Wiggins (WIGGINS@msu.edu)
Sun, 03 Oct 93 20:30:12 EDT

I want to be able to deliver a pageful of text to the user, and after a
timeout send the subsequent page. If I follow this, you want to
relocate the functionality to the client side from the server.
Your scheme forces me to invent a new mechanism, whereas it seems
natural to me to want to deliver followon text after a timeout. The
context isn't just slide shows per se; there might be all sorts
of situations where you'd want the client to go fetch a followon
URL -- for instance you might have an instructional "video" that
fetches one thing if the user selects an answer from a multiple-
choice menu; if the timeout period elapses, a "hint" page is
delivered instead.

I don't understand how this "clutters" the language. Can't the
HTML document metaphor embrace temporal aspects?

/rich

>Define a new Content-type: (e.g., www/slideshow), then define the protocol,
>and then get browsers to support it. Please Please Please don't clutter
>up the language with stuff that is more easily and better done externally.
>
>Something along these lines would be a start. This steals a bit from
>/bin/sh syntax. You could *almost* do this today with xmosaic :-)
>
> .mailcap: www/slideshow; /usr/local/bin/mosaic-slideshow %s
>or maybe
> .mailcap: www/slideshow; mosaic-internal-reference
>
>Content-type: www/slideshow
>
># www/slideshow example
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/audio/welcome.au &
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/welcome.html
>wait
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/audio/intro.au &
>get http://www.bsdi.com/slideshow/intro.html
>waitio # waits until the user selects something from intro.html
>...
>
>--sanders