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- Pei,
-
- ViolaWWW works great! It has impressed us here. Its fine on decstation and apollo
- displays (The crashing HP display was an HP X server problem.) A strange thing is
- that it seems to be so fast -- a search in the CERN phone book seems instantaneous
- (when done at CERN). Perhaps the line mode browser's critical path is the
- time taken for the terminal emulator to display the characters, and Viola is
- faster.
-
- We're going to have to standardize (have a competetion for) the WWW icon.
- I like the web, though some may be arachnophobic. We use a globe on the NeXT.
- I wondered about some combination of an open book and a globe...
-
- The viola changes aren't in www v1.1, but are in the master code for 1.2
- (or 1.1a) already.
-
- Now for details about the marking of fields for viola:
-
- >To answer your questions:
- >
- >> Do I correctly assume that anything which is displayed on the screen
-
- >> surrounded by SI..SO characters can be clicked on and will then be
-
- >> sent to www?
- >
- >That's correct, for the old version of Viola. This scheme, however, has
- >changed in the new version... (see below).
- >
- > Here are two important things Viola need to interface to www. Both might
- > be effected by -viola:
- >
- >1) A consistant and hopefully unique prompt ending. It should always look
- >the same ("::: " or whatever is predictable).
-
- Are you sure it isn't safer to use a non-printable character? That would
- be guaranted unique.
-
- > 2) Instead of the old (and limiting) SI..SO scheme, the new scheme is to use
- > the \h()\e() combination thusly:
- >
- > See also CERN copyright[\h(2)\e(2)].
- >
- > The text within \h(...) is displayed highlited, and text within \e(...)
-
- > is ``embedded'' into the text field for retrieval (when clicked) by Viola
- > scripts.
-
- To separate the anchor text (highlished bit) and the meaning is a good idea.
- In that case we would highlight the whole phrase: in the underlying mark-up,
- the beginning of the anchor is marked as well as the end, although that is not
- apparent with the line-mode browser normally. Using your example, this would come
- out like
-
- See also \h(CERN copyright)\e(2).
-
- without any [numbers] displayed at all.
-
- Again, the use of printable brackets () is a bit dangerous, as in fact
- there will be cases in which unmatche dbrackets appear within the highlighted bit.
-
-
- -------------
-
-
- > I'm very interested in producing a usable WWW front-end (the current
- > ViolaWWW was a one-nite hack to prove feasibility). I am also thinking
- > of incorporating the HHTP code into Viola. Thou I have to look at the
-
- > code more...
- >
-
- If you want to look at the code, see whether your text widget can implement the
- "Object Building" methods in HText.h. These are the calls made by the www
- communications code and parsers to build the hypertext. If you can provide those,
- it should be easy. You just call one of the routines in HTAccess.h to
- load a document by name, and it calls you back to create and build the document.
-
-
- >> More qustions:
- >> Did you need any mods to viola, or is everything you needed put into
-
- >> the "ht" stack? In other words, was the viola directory a stnadrd
-
- >> release which we can replace with new versions when they come out?
- >
- > No modification was made to Viola in order to front-end the modified
- > www.
-
- Great stuff.
-
-
- > [...] No problem! Give me a few days, and I may have the new ViolaWWW ready.
-
- > It will have a lot of improvements such as multiple fonts and geometry
- > management.
-
- If you really do multiple fonts, that would be great! In that case
- you will probably want to combine the www access code with viola itself
- in order to get the style changes as a hypertext document is parsed.
- That would be really neat. It would remove all this marking of fields with
- funny characters, as well.
-
- >> Tim
-
- > -Pei
- Tim
-
-
-