Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 02:29:38 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Cc: config@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Config Manifesto comments? Message-ID: <19576.853064978@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 12 Jan 1997 01:12:29 %2B1030." <199701111442.BAA08271@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
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> No; redbacks are venomous spiders, a somewhat larger relative of the > beastie you call the "black widow". They're aggressive and, with the Oh my! That's just great. Aggressive, venomous spiders. If there are two qualities I most abhor in a spider, it's a sack of venom or an attitude. To have both is really bad luck, you have my full sympathy! :) > Well, I'm happy to be convinced otherwise, but I remain skeptical. If > you can come up with something that can handle interactive activities, > and asynchronously-posted server-side events without a client-side > scripting language, then I'll happily go along with it. Well, define "interactive activities" please. :-) Naturally you're not going to be able to do cute shaded draggy-bars and stuff in HTML, but you can certainly do forms and menus which provide the same basic functionality for the things you want to control (like filesystem sizes), just not with quite so much flash. I can do without the flash if it buys an easily distributed management station capability and provides the closest thing to a "standard L&F" these days. And doesn't server-push buy you a reasonable facsimile of async server-side events? Just think of all those cameras. It's crude, but it basically works. > I simply fail to see how a fill-out-the-blanks interface, which is all > that HTML can offer, is going to provide this, and I refuse to > subscribe to the 20-billion-flies argument. One man's 20 billion flies is another man's principle of least surprise. :-) > > Also, Netscape 4.0 for BSD/OS will be linked shared so we won't be > > able to run it anyway. With 4.0, it'll be back to the Linux netscape > > for us, I'm afraid. > > Well that's just bloody wonderful, isn't it? I can just guess how > well _that_ is going to be received. 8( Well, I'm going to make one last-ditch effort before giving in to that most contemptible of fates, but naturally no guarantees on that. They'll probably just blow me off. :( > The only thing that we win on using an HTML interface in this case is > the ability to display on non-x-capable (Windows, Mac) systems. I Not *just* that, even when running locally it provides you with a decoupled GUI interface, meaning one less piece you have to worry about, and you just let someone else sweat the browser (and there will be new and interesting browsers coming out for some time to come), concentrating instead on the internal structure and the implementation of new front-end modules. Running in the same direction as the other rats also has certain advantages - there's a huge and rapidly growing pile of HTML support code for doing all sorts of clever CGI things, and pre-existing familiarity with HTML trickery will help get people up to speed quickly with the technology at the stage where we're trying to get other folks to do front-end screens for this or that nice-to-have configuration option. Also please do bear in mind that we don't have to do this with an actual *web server*. If you wanted to just take something like, say, Jef Poskanzer's embeddable web server and stick it into the side of Juliette, that might work too. We don't necessarily have to rely on the evil that is the CGI specification. Like I said, there's a lot of work going on in this area right now and many different tools are floating around. Tk 8.0 even has an httpd library that lets you define actions directly for "URLs", and it handles the callback whenever someone selects one of them. Everyone, and I mean everyone, is scrambling to produce HTML driven configuration utilities these days, and I really do think that the handwriting is on the wall here, Mike, in big, tall letters. ;) Besides, I think we're a lot more likely to find help if we go this route. I can think of someone right now who's already engaged in actively trying to do something all these lines under FreeBSD as a thesis project. Jordan
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