Good idea, Brian. And good responses ... "yeah, what he said".
I wrote a not-fully-featured line-mode tool to help with
stuff like this. I say, cron it. Signal the browser? Maybe.
Obviously you'd *have* to signal the browser sometime ... somehow ...
in some cases. But it makes sense (for now) to have an agent that
builds, say, HTML of "things that have changed".
...
>Fenn home page *when*it's*changed*, and if it gets a 302 Redirect it'll
>change the URL without even telling me.
That's a nice touch. Yes, that helps. Suggests that I
should add redirection info as an optional second stream from 'webcat'.
That is, you get the body of the file from its stdout and "meta info"
from file descriptor 2 or 3. (not sure if I want to mix programmatic
non-error information with human readable error messages)
>So in this case, instead of storing people's section preferences in a
>huge database on the server side, as we would be doing, the person would
>define their own preferences directly in their browser, ...
I like Hakon's stong wording about being presently bound
to the mouse. A browser that implements all this function should have
a CLI way to fiddle with the settings at least, if not a CLI way of
doing just about everything. I don't use a web browser as my desktop
interface. Instead, I typically invoke the browser quite like the
browser invokes 'xv'. So I want to take input from non-human sources
to merge into my preferences.
> Brian
>
>--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--
>brian@hotwired.com brian@hyperreal.com http://www.hotwired.com/Staff/brian/
>
-- Rick Troth <troth@ua1vm.ua.edu>, Houston, Texas, USA http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~troth/