Date   : Wed, 14 Nov 2001 23:53:08 +0000
From   : James Fidell <james@...>
Subject: Re: That BBC online database thing you all forgot about....

Quoting Richard Gellman (r.gellman@...):

> So, based on all this, what would you think of the idea of a simple browser
> (single list only, no directories or anything) for retrieving disk images
> from sites from within BeebEm? It would use HTTP to retrieve lists and
> images, possibly even supporting zipped images. Limited information would be
> supplied, such as title, and software type, and it wouldn't be anything as
> elegant as internet explorer.

My gut reaction is that the functionality is a nice idea, but the
architecture is wrong.  It may be that this is partially a bias from
having a Unix background rather than windows and I know how I'd go
about it on a Unix system, but for what it's worth here's how I'd be
tempted to implement it:

The emulator should be able to launch a (any) web browser for browsing
images/whatever.  This means you don't have to re-write a whole pile
of functionality that already exists.  An interface to the emulator
should be provided as a handler for Netscape/IE for files of type
(say) application/beeb-emulator.  This would start up the emulator
with the new image (if it wasn't already running), or get an
existing emulator invocation to load the new image instead of the
current one.  A bit like the way the Real Audio plugin works, I guess.

James