Wireless WWW

A quick review of the two projects / papers

Mobisaic

Mobile Computing at the University of Washington

• Dynamic Environment Variables
  • Dynamic URLs
    • http://www/places/$(Location).html
• Customized X Mosaic
  • <!- (subscribe to $(variable)) -!>
    • reload (default)
    • load URL
    • spawn URL
    • close
  • $(MOBISAIC-STREAM)

Rover

MIT Laboratory for Computer Science

• Tcl scripts as a new MIME content type
  • "safe" script commands only
  • Tk can bring up external windows
• Customized NCSA Mosaic
  • Caching & Prefetching
  • Variables made available to Tcl scripts
    • Hardware platform being used
    • Current location
  • Hooks to load a URL from Tcl scripts
  • Callbacks so scripts can get UI events

Another similar project

Dataman

Mobile Wireless Computing at Rutgers University

• Location- and time-dependent active pages
• Modified html, added markups
• Customized NSCA Mosaic & HTTP server
• Page authoring tool

Points for discussion

• Active pages are not a new idea (how long has Hot Java been around?), and they appear to be useful even in the non-wireless case. What value does the wireless communications add beyond that of active pages?
• The systems described above add the capability to walk around and "bump into" URLs. Still focusing on the issue of wireless www, this seems to be the only thing that couldn't be done in quite the same way in a workstation www application. Is this assessment correct?
• Suppose this technology evolves beyond the "bump into URLs" capability, which direction will it go?