[7284] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: WWW UI events
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Burchard)
Sat Jan 21 10:40:20 1995
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 1995 15:57:47 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: burchard@horizon.math.utah.edu
From: Paul Burchard <burchard@horizon.math.utah.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Daniel Dardailler <daniel@x.org> writes:
> To some, HTML Forms over HTTP POST (or ISMAP for that
> matters) might be considered as a rudimentary UIMS
HTML FORMs, despite their glaringly obvious limitations as a UIMS,
are available to essentially anyone able to access the Web, whatever
platform they may use. That's a very valuable assumption, which
can't be made about X.
> I'm not flaming the Web here, all this just stems from the
> original design goals of HTTP, its statelessness in
> particular, and we have to be careful when shifting our goals.
Agreed. While the Web needs a way to handle stateful transactions,
such "session" capabilities must be added with *great* care.
Sessions are an optimization, and the optimizations suitable for
turning the Web into a global distributed software system are
different from those suitable for implementing a desktop UIMS. In
particular, because the Web has a larger client/server ratio than
your typical UIMS, the advantages of maintaining state on the client
side instead of the server increase in the Web setting.
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Paul Burchard <burchard@math.utah.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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