The X-Windows versions of Mosaic have, for quite some time, implemented
a SIGNAL which can cause Mosaic to flip pages. This is documented at
NCSA.
Lately, because of the demands of the community of users, they have
specified something known as the Common Client Interface (CCI), which
is a specification for making requests to Web browsers. It is implemented
in the X-Windows versions, and will (real soon now) be implemented in the
MS-Windows and Macintosh versions.
The URL which defines CCI is
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/cci-spec.html
It is important that any VRML browser implement MIME, completely; otherwise
cyberspace can not have the multimedia richness that the Web does have.
There are (to my knowledge) two ways of doing this:
1) Read in the .mime.types and .mailcap yourself (if under UNIX, if under
MS-Windows you'd have to parse the MOSAIC.INI and NETSCAPE.INI files, etc.)
and use this in order to determine what types launch what apps. There's
plenty of sample source code to demonstrate this in the NCSA Mosaic X sources.
2) Hand any type other than ".wrl" off to Mosaic (or some other browser),
and then let them deal with it. That's what happens in the preliminary
versions of Labyrinth, and it also works just fine, and is much easier to
implement.
Hope this helps.
Mark Pesce
Cyberneticist,
Enterprise Integration Technologies