Re: fire up vrml reader

Linas Vepstas (linas@innerdoor.austin.ibm.com)
Tue, 15 Nov 1994 14:47:37 -0600


Whoops. I guess I was wrong. Mark Pesce nailed that one.
--linas

> Of course, you could get fancy, and have the two readers doing
> hand-shakes and exchanging events, and what-not, but I don't
> know that mozaic or mozilla or any other reader has ever provided
> for this sort of multi-viewer function. Not sure why this would
> even be an interesting feature, given that the simple solution seems
> to work fine.
>
> --linas
>
>
> Lately, because of the demands of the community of users, they have
> specified something known as the Common Client Interface (CCI), which
> is a specification for making requests to Web browsers. It is implemented
> in the X-Windows versions, and will (real soon now) be implemented in the
> MS-Windows and Macintosh versions.
>
> The URL which defines CCI is
>
> http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/cci-spec.html
>
> It is important that any VRML browser implement MIME, completely; otherwise
> cyberspace can not have the multimedia richness that the Web does have.
>
> There are (to my knowledge) two ways of doing this:
>
> 1) Read in the .mime.types and .mailcap yourself (if under UNIX, if under
> MS-Windows you'd have to parse the MOSAIC.INI and NETSCAPE.INI files, etc.)
> and use this in order to determine what types launch what apps. There's
> plenty of sample source code to demonstrate this in the NCSA Mosaic X sources.
>
> 2) Hand any type other than ".wrl" off to Mosaic (or some other browser),
> and then let them deal with it. That's what happens in the preliminary
> versions of Labyrinth, and it also works just fine, and is much easier to
> implement.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> Mark Pesce
> Cyberneticist,
> Enterprise Integration Technologies
>