7.5 Technical Summary Remarks

"Social" Difficulties:

• Training

• Updating

Technical Difficulties (summary):

• Installation of a server (easy)

• Filters for transforming documents (quite easy)

• Search Engines and Data-Bases (hard)

• Educational Server-Side scripts (quite hard)

General Limits of the Web

• "Statelessness"

• Speed

• Security

• lack of easily installable & understandable server-side scripts (educators are not PERL hackers!)

On the Client Side

• Use Mime types in order to launch an application on the client-side.
  • An elegant solution, risky, since such an application could damage your system.

  • Needs some modifications of Clients (sometimes)

• +/-Standard Interfaces to programs like mail & news
  • (Job of Client providers)

On the Server Side

• Use forms to run programs on the server side. Secure, but slow, sometimes tricky and not always appropriate.
  • Ex: dynamic hypertext

  • Ex: Interfaces to any kind of program: e.g. simulations

WWW standards

• HTML 1 (basic)

• HTML 2 (HTML+) (forms & inlined images)
  • Today's de facto "standard"

• HTML 3 (tables, ???)

• synchronous (difficult today)
  • WWW<->MOO Interfaces

  • Web-Talk

  • Still experimental, the future is probably integrated www-communication clients.

• asynchronous (by using server-side programs, i.e.
  • Mail/News gateways (integration of other standard Internet tools for ease of use)

  • Collaborative Annotation

  • Conferencing Systems
    e.g. WebForum, WIT, Hypernews