Crawling info displays and slide shows

Richard Wiggins (WIGGINS@msu.edu)
Mon, 27 Sep 93 16:32:00 EDT


Last night, while watching the public information channel our university
offers through the local cable TV company, I was thinking it would be
nice to offer that same info via our CWIS. (The content is a mix of
campus events, new programs, phone numbers, scenes of campus, etc.)
Since this stuff is probably typed into a proprietary display tool on an
Amiga somewhere, I'd have to convince someone to retype the info into
another medium, or someone would have to develop a tool to export from
the proprietary display engine to another form.

But it occurs to me that maybe the opposite approach could be taken. Has
anyone looked into providing this sort of "crawling" display and/or
slide-show displays via World-Wide Web? Ie rather than expecting the
user to click on a choice, the document includes a URL to fetch next,
and a timeout to wait before fetching it. To completely simulate the
type of display I'm talking about, you could even give the client a type
of transition to do between screens -- a dissolve, or a page turn, what
have you. (I know, this gets into presentation issues, anathema to
some.)

With this sort of functionality in HTML and with specialized client
software, you'd put all this information in your CWIS, and you'd have
the TV station broadcast a feed from the CWIS, instead of working the
other way around. But the show would also be available for anyone coming
in over the net as well -- one effort serves both needs.

Please forgive me if this has already been addressed -- hard to keep up
lately. Anyone already doing this sort of thing?

/Rich Wiggins, Gopher Coordinator, Michigan State U