Re: Conditional HTML w/<INSERT> (was: Microsoft IE)

Sez M. Hedlund (for which I'm grateful):
>
>
>On Mon, 29 Jan 1996, John Franks wrote:
>> One suggestion has been a conditional HTML which is parsed and interpreted
>> by the client.  This seems to be a very good idea.  It completely solves
>> the caching problem.  One drawback is that documents might become
>> substantially larger if they contain all virtual versions.
>
>My recent thinking on this issue is that a form of conditional HTML could
>be implemented with <INSERT>.  Give some <PARAM>'s that describe the
>conditions under which the insert SRC should be requested, and let the
>browser decide whether it should get the insert or not. 
>
><INSERT SRC="http://www.name.dom/path/table.html" 
>   TYPE="text/conditional-html">
><PARAM NAME="condition" VALUE="vendor-tables/1.1">
><P>Your browser doesn't recognize vendor-tables/1.1, so you're seeing 
>this instead.</P>
></INSERT>


This is much like what several relational database vendors are doing to
implement Web front ends to RDBMS's.  Some have created cgi-bin scripts
which allow SQL statements to be embedded in HTML documents on the
fly and passed off to the database backend for processing.  Others are
using a middleware server mechanism which implements some kind of extended
HTML which can include SQL commands, canned DB procedures, and the like.

You can read about this stuff at the major RDBMS vendors' Web pages.

-- 
Tim Evans                     |    E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co.
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Received on Monday, 29 January 1996 14:17:04 UTC