Re: ERB call on addressing

On Mar 26,  2:09pm, lee@sq.com wrote:
> Subject: Re: ERB call on addressing
> Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
> > Doesn't it make sense to be able to make Panorama-like browsers that can
> > intelligently navigate documents on DynaWeb-like servers without express
> > communication between the vendors?
>
> Yes.  In fact, this happens today.
> It's very simple, too -- perhaps too simple.  Each chapter has an explicit
> link to the next chapter.  The browser does not need to have any knnowledge
> that the object being viewed is a piece of a larger structure.
>
> This does not, of course, give a Panorama Navigator window for the
> larger document.  If you want to do that, you'll need to specify an
> _awful_ lot more than saying what you want the URL to look like.
>

It seems to me the essential question is, if I have separate URLs for each
chapter, then they can refer to each other, but if I have one URL for the book,
and retrieve each chapter as a query, then any cross references require
returning to the server, because each cross reference is a query.  So we want a
syntax that says "give me piece X of document Y".  This way, if I have two
pieces of the same document at the client, the client can resolve cross
references.  Current practice, as I understand, would require downloading the
entire book and using # for cross references.

It's not enough to build a navigator window, but at least you can start
displaying an index of which parts of the document have been retrieved.

Matthew Fuchs
matt@wdi.disney.com

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Received on Thursday, 27 March 1997 13:23:02 UTC