Re: Local program exection in WWW browsers

Rainer Klute ([email protected])
Tue, 19 Apr 1994 10:53:49 +0200

>Presumably we want this interpreter to be able to interact with the
>WWW client after it is running. Offhand, I can think of at least two
>new commands you would want the untrusted interpreter; one to send the
>client a URL and have it go to and display it, and one to send a MIME
>message (which may be a part of a multipart structure the program was
>enclosed in, or HTML built on the fly, or whatever) to the client to
>be displayed as though it were sent by a server.
>
>Unfortunately this means defining a way to tell clients to do this.
>Obviously implementing this for TkWWW will be trivial, but most
>clients don't have any provision for this kind of stuff (and those
>that do often implement it poorly.) Either that or embed the
>interpreters in the client itself, which is unlikely to happen soon.

Some time ago I wrote some lines on how to support not only local
but also remote clients. The bottom line is to treat applications
available on the Internet similar to documents and thus access them
via a to-be-defined URI. Embedding graphical applications inside
graphical WWW browsers can be done in principle, at least for X11
with the new Fresco toolkit available with the now very soon to be
released X11R6. However, security is still an issue to think about
heavily.

My suggestions are available as
<http://www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de//WWW/GeneralGateways.html>.
Perhaps I'll get some feedback from you?

Best regards
Rainer Klute

Dipl.-Inform. IRB - immer richtig beraten
Rainer Klute EXUG - European X User Group
Universitdt Dortmund, IRB
D-44221 Dortmund Tel.: +49 231 755-4663

<http://www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/IRB/Klute.html>