[5032] in www-talk@info.cern.ch

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Re: W3A - update and questions

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bert Bos)
Mon Aug 1 08:41:34 1994

Date: Mon, 1 Aug 1994 14:36:19 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: bert@let.rug.nl
From: Bert Bos <bert@let.rug.nl>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>

Steve Miale wrote:

 |Bert Bos wrote in <9407141927.AA17909@freya.let.rug.nl>:
 |>Platform-independence:
 |>
 |>        Viewers need to display their output in a window provided by
 |>        the browser. Under X, it is easy to pass a widget as an
 |>        argument to the viewer. Is there an equivalent datastructure
 |>        under MS Windows, or on the Mac? Requirements are that the
[...]
 |Why should this even be part of a W3A standard at all? It seems like something
 |the HTML browser itself should handle.
 |
 |I'm working on a modularized WWW client, and handle this situation like so:
 |The html browser has it's own 'registry', a mapping of URLs to windows. When
 |a document comes in, it looks in the registry; if there, it sends the document
 |to that particular window. Otherwise, it creates a new window.
 |
 |Similarly, if you want a particular URL to appear in a particular window, you
 |have to register it beforehand. No big deal; it's fairly simple code.

I've really tried to omit windows from the W3A API, but I can't find a
solution. I don't quite understand the paragraph above: the
browser is able to tell the viewer which window to use, but it
needs no new protocol for that? Can you explain?

The model in my head is:

  - viewers are tied to Content-Type
  - a particular instance of a viewer for a particular document is
    tied to a particular window (the instance is discarded afterwards)
  - the browser deals out screen space (rectangular areas within the
    boundaries of which viewer instances can do what they want)

Steve, you seem to suggest that :

  - there is only one viewer instance, which handles all docs of a
    particular type (you say `URL' but that can't be right)
  - its single window is registered with the browser by some means
    outside of the program (you say `HTML browser', don't you mean
    `WWW browser'?)

How can this deal with, for example:

  - simultaneous display of two documents of the same type
  - in-lined material


Bert
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