|In Chicago, I made a joke about in-line PDF documents, which drew a hard
|stare and "Why not?" from Dave Raggett. I'm slow, but I figured out that
|his basic point, which is that just about anything might be in-lined, is at
|least worth considering.
This is what I have been advocating for at least half a year. The
structure of the browser should allow fully recursive nested formats,
of any type whatsoever:
- inline GIF in HTML (HTML viewer calls GIF viewer)
- inline HTML in HTML (HTML viewer calls HTML viewer)
- PostScript in HTML in HTML (HTML calls HTML, which calls PS)
- inline PDF in whatever in somethingelse
- etc.
(Note that MCCI, Mosaic's remote control, is not useful here.)
|But it brings us back to the same question that has been kicked around here
|several times -- how do we distribute executables safely? With Acrobat as
|a helper application, we trust that when we ftp it from adobe.com, it's
|safe. It's a bit more fear-inducing when there are lots of people
|distributing executables that would somehow be linked into a browser so
|that features like in-line PDF would be possible.
|
|In any event, today's situation is that we are coming from the helper
|application model, which could lead us toward a future in which Web
|browsing becomes a components of many applications, so the the browser you
|get depends on the nature of the document you retrieve. Some suggest that
|Mosaic, for example, might become little more than a window manager.
I didn't phrase it like that (i.e., "window manager"), but my W3A API
would indeed make the central browser into something like a window
manager. Except that from an ergonomics point of view I would like it
to manage as few windows as possible, just 1 preferrably.
However, for this to work conveniently, the PDF viewer should be
rewritten as an applet, using the standardized API. I don't really
want to intercept the viewer's X events, like a real window manager
does.
Of course, I don't want to write a PDF interpreter from scratch. So
the question is: will there be an W3A-compliant PDF applet, or if not,
a PDF library?
And if PDF is `unsafe' (PostScript is, but I don't know enough about
PDF), then we will want to have `safe-PDF-viewers' as well.
Bert
PS. For W3A see <http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/W3A/W3A>
PPS. All browsers so far belong to what I call "the 1st
generation". Browsers with applets (W3A or something better) would be
the 2nd generation, and the 3rd generation would probably see
distributed browsers. Anybody willing to help develop this 2nd
generation?
-- ___________________________________________________________________________ ####[ Bert Bos ]####[ Alfa-informatica, ]#### ####[ <[email protected]> ]####[ Rijksuniversiteit Groningen ]#### ####[ http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/ ]####[ Postbus 716 ]#### ####[ ]####[ NL-9700 AS GRONINGEN ]#### ####[______________________________]####[_____________________________]####