Not all that neglected. See
http://www.phone.net/~mwm/Mosaic-Rexx-Interface/manual.html for the
manual to one such interface.
> 1) Building extensions for current browsers;
Yup; this is the thing that's been most exploited. The hotlist and
print interfaces have been replaced by invocation of scripts. I have
scripts to interact with other HTML display mechanisms, add entries to
pages, interact with editors, etc. Other people have scripts to post
news: followups, and there's probably things happening that nobody
involved thought of.
> 2) A secure substitute for other CGI scripting languages; and
We haven't done much of that; the faciities that would allow servers
to invoke scripts weren't put in place.
> 3) Adding intelligent agent capabilities to the Web.
We've talked a bit about this. For a lot of the things suggested, the
scripts don't belong in a the browser, as you don't really need - or
even want - a GUI active while this is going on. Libraries to provide
high-level WWW facilities to other languages provide the same
functionality, without having to start a fairly large application to
get to them.
> Intelligent Web agents would:
>
> i) Be able to walk the Web on their own (travel from machine to machine);
Robots or spiders, which have already been written using library
facilities as discussed above.
> If the URL "http://your.machine.com/Agent-Entry" did not exist, no agent
> could enter that Web. If agents are permitted entry, capability (iii) along
> with constraints (a)-(d) should enable each site to formulate an appropriate
> policy for agent execution. "Spiders" could really walk the Web...
Why not use the existing protocols for robots?
> I suggest the name "Spider" for this Safe-Tcl extension.
That name is already in use as an alias for web-wondering robots.
<mike