I have read that OpenDoc is a functional superset of OLE 2.0, so I
believe the answer here is yes.
The X window system's basic architecture is itself very well suited for
the loaning of child windows to other applications. The problem is that
heretofore there has not been a defined protocol for such sharing. I believe
that X11R6 (with the Fresco C++ OO toolkit) will provide some explicit
support for this kind of mechanism.
The external-viewer-in-a-browser-window stuff, while conceptually wonderful,
doesn't strike me as so terribly important. I think that image filters
can do the job just as well (Mosaic or whatever calls a filter with the
data and gets back a GIF file, for instance). The important thing is to
have some kind of standard way to represent any kind of linear transformations
that such a filter might induce, so that polygonal regions defined as buttons
in the image will be properly mapped to the resulting GIF image.
Of course, if we went to a system where we could have active objects such
as PostScript programs embedded in HTML documents, then we would need to
talk about such an embedding system.
> ======================================================================
> Mark Fisher Thomson Consumer Electronics
> [email protected] Indianapolis, IN
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Jonathan Abbey [email protected]
Applied Research Laboratories The University of Texas at Austin
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