Would this count as prior art?

In July of 1994, I distributed a small web browser written in the Python 
language called "Dancer" which had a form of configurable plug-in:

http://www.python.org/search/hypermail/python-1994q3/0070.html

Dancer was meant to be modularized, unlike Mosaic. Looking at 'dancer' gives
you some idea of what this means. There are two types of modules that can
be loaded: agents, which retrieve URLs, and viewers, which display or 
process
them.

For instance,

import basicurl

loads in the file 'agents/basicurl.py'. You are not forced to use this; you
could write your own if you thought it would be better or faster. The same
goes for the viewers:

import audio
import pict
import mpeg
import postscript
import whtml

Each module is only required to register itself with the dispatcher module;
it must tell it what kind of data it is looking for. For example,
'viewers/audio.py' consists of:

import posix
from dispatcher import *

def Play(url, name, (file, header)):
posix.system('/usr/openwin/bin/audiotool ' + file + ' &')

RegisterExtension('au', Play)
RegisterContentType('audio/basic', Play)

The last two lines register the MIME-style content type (when retrieving
files via HTTP) and the extension (when the content type is unavailable.)
Anything with a content type of "audio/basic" or an extension of "au" is
sent to Play. The callback takes the unfiltered URL, the filtered name
(originally the URL, but can be modified by modules which filter the data
rather than display it, like an uncompress module), and a tuple consisting
of the filename and the header (an RFC822 object; see rfc822.py).

Thoughts?

Steve

Received on Friday, 8 October 2004 22:43:38 UTC