Re: Forms support in clients

Gavin Nicol (gtn@ebt.com)
Tue, 27 Sep 1994 12:06:58 +0500


Browsers *will* become fully SGMl aware, and they *will* support
stylesheets, I can guarantee that.There is nothing wrong with
specifying a UI interms of SGMl either, thoug it *is* a somewhat
strange application. Something like:

<window>
<hbox>
<texteditor width=400><menu><item NAME="item1" VALUE="foobar">
</hbox>
</window>

I should mention that the lisp based distributed hypermedia system I
wrote a few years ago also allowed editing of UI's, and in fact, the
original goal was to allow groups to work together to build a UI
suitable to presenting the information they were concerned with. This
went as far as editable text areas, video clips etc.

The above system had many nice features, but is *way* overkill for the
WWW. Perhaps having systems like this would be great, but perhaps they
should be built on top of a simpler foundations, or perhaps seperately,
but still be able to interact with the WWW in a meaningful, and open
manner. Eventually we'll all be moving to distributed object systems
anyway...