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