Re: An Open And Extensible Personalised Proxy Framework

I think we should first make prototypes of filtering tools that run on a
publically available server rather than the user's machines.  This first of
all gets around the wide variety of personal proxies that Daniel pointed
out.  Also, even if we didn't have that problem, I think it will be much
easier to get feedback from a wide range of people if users just have to
type a url into a form instead of configuring their browsers.

Ultimately, it will be more efficient to have the proxies run on the users
machines, but I suggest we not worry about that now.

As far as how to do it.  I agree that like Al said just piping filters one
after the other may be a problem.  However, it has the big advantage that
we can use the various things people have written in java, C++, perl etc.
We want to re-use as much as possible

As far as implementing what Al mentioned about shared first pass into a DOM.

For Perl fans, there are modules available from CPAN that will create a
document tree.   I've just started to look at this.

The modules are available from CPAN, 

http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-module/HTML/


Once you're there, see especially

  HTML-Parser-2.22.readme

  HTML-Tree-0.51.readme

Depending on how forgiving these are for bad HTML, it may be useful to
preprocess with Dave Raggett's Tidy


     http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/


Even if Perl fans do use this DOM, I'd urge us to figure out how to combine
it with other DOM implementations, including non-Perl stuff also, e.g. WAG.
 This implies putting them in a pipeline like Al mentioned.

You'd probably want to pass hints though.  For example, one filter may want
to tell the following ones "I've already made the font larger".  One way to
do this would be to pass hints and parameters in Meta Tags within the HTML
itself.  That way it wouldn't interfere with forms for example.


Len
-------
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Universal Design Engineer, Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Adjunct Professor, Electrical Engineering
Temple University

Ritter Hall Annex, Room 423, Philadelphia, PA 19122
kasday@acm.org        
(215} 204-2247 (voice)
(800) 750-7428 (TTY)

Received on Friday, 4 June 1999 21:49:49 UTC