Re: two ideas....

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Tue, 15 Dec 92 12:46:28 +0100


Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 12:46:28 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-Id: <9212151146.AA00506@www3.cern.ch>
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Subject: Re: two ideas....
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch



>  Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 11:32:40 -0800
>  From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

> [...]
>  

>  The commonality here is that some documents should only appear in
>  dialog boxes (when the browser supports it) as opposed to appearing
>  and being dealt with as full-fledged regular documents.

The NeXTStep browser gets a similar look progressively, by
resizing the window to exactly surround the document if it will fit on a  
screen, and then by  eliminating both the scroll bar and the "resive bar'  
(NeXTStep window decoration) if the document is also not editable.

>  The advantages in implementing this kind of thing are (1) WWW becomes
>  a little more like some other current systems (notably Intermedia,
>  with the effectively one-to-many links), boosting its ability to take
>  over the functions that other systems have provided up until now, and
>  (2) navigational disorientation is lessened when minor references
>  (e.g., to glossary entries or menus of anchors) are instantiated
>  onscreen as minor GUI elements.

Another possibility is to allow for a 'collection" object which is separate
from a document and  more constrained, would have a simple on-screen
representation, would map to gopher menus, newsgroups, lists, etc.

>  So how about allowing a tag (say, <transient>) to be included in the
>  header of an HTML document to specify this property?
>  

>  Marc

I worry that you will find that there is a continuous gradient between the  
transient and the non-transient, with many stages in between.
 

>  ps Specifically for the glossary system, I'm thinking of having a
>  regular glossary document with all the entries in a list and then
>  having a special server shell script strip (say that three times fast)
>  out a given entry when it's needed, adding the <transient> flag while
>  constructing a document for the entry on the fly.
>  


this is what Mike Sendall's STING gloassary is.   (See link from CERN page).

Tim