Towards Standards for an Interactive Web

Discussion page maintained by Paul Burchard <burchard@geom.umn.edu>.

You can add contribute to these HyperNews documents. References to relevant articles in the HTML-WG, WWW-VRML, or WWW-Talk archives are especially encouraged.

The first phase of this discussion is about the design requirements for various types of interactivity. The focus is on clarifying the needs of applications, with minimal prejudice as to implementation. Experimental implementations are nevertheless essential for revealing additional design considerations. Each topic or subtopic contains:

• General reasons why this should be a design requirement.
• General reasons why this should NOT be a design requirement.
• Applications which are claimed to require this feature.
• Proposed or experimental solutions.
• Subsidiary issues to be resolved.

Phase I: Evaluation of Design Requirements.

(Is this list complete? usefully categorized?)

• Client extensibility.
  • Format- and language-independent client extension framework ("object model").
  • Interpreted extensions ("scripting").
  • Byte-compiled extensions ("virtual machines").
  • Binary extensions ("components").

• Enhanced client GUI support.
  • Complete range of GUI events.
  • Complete GUI layout control.

• Enhanced communication model.
  • Server-to-client callbacks.
  • Session protocols (client-server or peer-to-peer).

Updated: Tue Jul 25 1995

HyperNews Responses

1. Real-time requirements (Tom Meyer)

1. this is an experiment (grace)

1. Untitled ()

2. time issue (Ying Sun)

3. time issue (Ying Sun)

4. I'm looking at this (Alan Ross)

2. this is a response (Gong Szeto)

3. Using the JAVA language (Duane Moore III)

1. JAVA versus SGML filosofy. (Alexander Boström)

1. 4/10 ()

1. Understanding HotJava; understanding MMM (Iain O'Cain)

1. Java and SGML are orthogonal? (Charlie Stross)

1. JAVA to replace current Operating Systems (Ron Lake)

1. What SGML has to do with Java (David Megginson)

2. The (Christophe Vermeulen)

2. Untitled (Uri Bruck)

3. Untitled ()

4. This appears to be a simple threaded conversation ()

1. Avec tout le monde (Natemutt)

2. 1) (Francisco)

3. Threaded Conversations (TC)

5. About Interactive Post from Ari (Iasson Salkitzoglou)

6. Untitled ()

7. test ()

1. very nice ()

1. recurive annotations (Anoop Gupta)

2. testtest (Piotrek Wyrzykowski)

8. HTML for presentation - Java for interactivity - Scripting utils for end-user (Nicolas GRILLY)

1. Performance is a non-issue (Charlie Hendricksen)

1. Untitled (John)

9. How high should the bar be? '486 DX4? '386 SX? 286? CGA? (Bernard D. Tremblay (Ben))

10. SQL integration Wanted (Yves Benigot)

11. Frames and URLs (Daniel LaLiberte)

12. Proposal : Simple but useful tag : include (Andy Clapham)

13. Can Netizens Influence REALITY? (Paula Moran)

14. Can Netizens Influence REALITY? (Paula Moran)