> 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.
What me stare! :-)
> 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.
This is where secure http comes in. We can use http to download programs
from "trusted" sources. The trust hierarchies determine who you trust
directly or indirectly and for what kinds of things. Phill Hallam-Baker
can explain this much better than I can. The next idea is to allow http
headers to be used to map a content type to the URL/URN for a matching
application module for displaying it inline. The integration technology would
be based on OLE or OpenDoc or what ever is appropriate to each platform.
Client-server negotiation resolves the URL/URN to whichever application module
is needed for each platform. I hope to work with W3O on exploring this for
real sometime next year.
-- Best wishes,Dave Raggett ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hewlett Packard Laboratories email: [email protected] Filton Road, Stoke Gifford tel: +44 272 228046 Bristol BS12 6QZ fax: +44 272 228003 United Kingdom