MetaCard Web Browser

[Wilhelm Sanke]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, sadhu at castandcrew.com (Sadhunathan Nadesan)
in response to eric.allen.engle at justice.com
wrote:

> Very kewl!
>
>  It doesn't seem to work for me though.  I enter a URL and it
>  just says 'loading be patient' in the message box,
>  and nothing ever happens.
>
>  ??
>
Eric Engle's browser is just subject to the limitations of the specific
Metacard-HTML capabilities that were discussed several times on this
list.

Apart from the disability to display images there are web sites whose
texts cannot be displayed with Metacard-HTML, because they use a
proprietary format. Take the website of my institution - University of
Kassel "www.uni-kassel.de" that unfortunately cannot be displayed in
Eric's browser, as it is set up with a programming tool "Sesame", but
can be displayed in any conventional browser.-

Eric's browser is based on - and of course elaborated to take a step in
the direction of a browser application -

"put URL "Whatever" into InterimVariable
set the htmltext of field "Browserfield" to InterimVariable"

a succession of lines that many of the list members have (successfully)
tried to integrate into their stacks that deal with internet
communication and that comprise and demonstrate additional internet
capabilities of  Metacard (launching a "real" browser, up- and
downloading files, sending emails from within Metacard files, and - most

important - downloading Metacard files for immediate use from a server
*without* the intervention of a browser by means of "downloadNgo" and
the Metacard substack "download.mc").

Personally I would very much like to see a further extension of
Metacards HTML capabilities as it was suggested by other list members in

the discussions. But this is a question, as was pointed out,  what
priorities should be set for the development of Metacard, given the
limited "personal resources" of Metacard.
One argument against extended HTML capabilities of Metacard was that
there *is* the ability to launch a web browser like Netscape or Explorer

any time you want from within Metacard, so what?

This does not mean that I do not appreciate Eric Engle's browser and
related stacks. We use a similar approach here when we offer sample
stacks to our students to demonstrate and encourage the use of Metacard
for internet-related tasks. I will add Eric's browser to these samples.

Regards,

Wilhelm Sanke