How about variable name substitution in URLs? E.g., you
could use a HREF=file://$parentsite$parentdir/foo.html to make
explicit how the broswer should construct relative pathnames.
The advantage of this over the current HREF=file:foo.html
scheme is it opens up many other kinds of context-sensitive
URLs, like substituting the parentsite but naming a new
directory path. Or, browsers (the WWW library I guess) could
define new variables like $standardsite, which would depend
on the user's continent (per the recent suggestion about
distributing servers).
Or, what intriques me the most is using variable substitution
with Dave Raggett's electronic forms. That is, we could define
a tag construct like
<blank FIELDTYPE=string LVAL=keyw1>Enter Keyword:</entry>
A typical GUI browser would render this as an entry widget embedded
at the appropriate spot in the text. Anything typed into the
widget would become the value of the variable $keyw1, and
subsequently substituted into a URL. For example, we could put
WAIS keyword prompts inside the server HTML document, which would
be a good thing.
Jay
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Jay C. Weber [email protected]
Enterprise Integration Technologies [email protected]
459 Hamilton Avenue, Suite #100 (415)617-8002
Palo Alto, CA 94301