Re: About Automatic Entry: Profiling

Michele Bassan <bassan@pdadr1.pd.cnr.it> wrote:
| As this matter is finally being worked on, I want to add a point, not strictly
| HTML related, but surely strictly related to this topic:
| browsers need user profiling.
| 
| In a few words:
| 1 -I use my computer at work together with my room mate
| 2 -I use my computer at home together with my wife (sons later)
| 3 -I use my computer for hobbystic programmin-surfing together with a friend.
| 
| Therefore browsers should allow to instantly switch from one user profile to
| the | other. Otherwise all this automatic filling will not be useful. I am
| pretty sure that for a while people won't have two or more separate
| computers at home, one each head.
| 
| Eudora allows something similar, if you create a numer of setting files with
| different names (although not exactly so: the recipients file is hard-linked
| to the settings file, and I have to manually keep aligned my three setting
| files for the three different computers I have adresses on).

Profiling is probably not the right solution to this kind of problems
because one can not resonably expect all applications to support user
profiles.  Windows 95 provides user logins and so does all UNIX machines.
(I don't know about how Mac's handle multi-user environment.)  I think
that browsers should explicitly *not* provide user profiling and expect the
operating systems to implicitly support that.
--
Bill Cheng // Guest at Columbia Unversity Computer Science Department
william@CS.COLUMBIA.EDU      ...!{uunet|ucbvax}!cs.columbia.edu!william
WWW Home Page: <URL:http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~william>

Received on Sunday, 25 February 1996 19:32:23 UTC