- From: H&kon W Lie <howcome@dxcern.cern.ch>
- Date: Sat, 25 Mar 1995 13:07:21 --100
- To: brian@wired.com
- Cc: www-talk@www10.w3.org
Brian Behlendorf writes: > It occurred to me that a more general solution to all this would be if > browsers implemented a cron-style auto-fetch functionality - where I could > say "fetch this URL every day at 3pm and let me know if it changes". The > browser would present the fetched pages in a menu the same way a mail reader > presents mail messages. While one could implement this functionality quite easily today, I think browsers will need to free themselves from the tyranny of the mouse before we see real solutions. The current user interface metaphors on our desktops demands user interaction in order to take any action. While cron remains with us (and may have a glorious future ahead) browsers have little concept of time and the age of information. They hardly know anything about the importance and preferred presentation of documents, Also, they don't have any idea of what else your screen is filled with at 3pm. All this makes it hard to create a decent solution that you would recommend beyond this mailing list. My attack angle towards these issues is style sheets. By hinting to the browsers how information should be presented we can give browsers a better basis for making presentational decisions. The style sheet language should be able to address aspects other than the obvious visual ones. In my style sheet proposal (available through http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Style/) on can e.g. attach presentation parameters to the age of the document (I hope to have this feature implemented in Arena soon). Allowing the user to specify when certain information should be presented is an interesting extension. -h&kon Hakon W Lie, WWW project CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23 http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/People/howcome/
Received on Saturday, 25 March 1995 07:07:25 UTC