Re: More thoughts on hyperlinks in tn5250 and mozilla integration

james rich wrote:
> 
[snipsnipsnip]

Okay, here's what I think.

First off, a lot of people on this list have, at times, said "We don't
want another Client
Access" - referring to the bloat, of course.  I think we would be
treading down that path
by implementing tn5250 in mozilla.  True, no-one would be required to
use the mozilla]
version, but I have a better idea:

What if we made a CGI-based HTML-to-5250 gateway *and* extended mozilla
to allow a few
extra Javascript (or whatever) tags that would allow our CGI gateway to
instruct the
browser how to trap the proper keystrokes?

This way, we save some implementation work (hacking mozilla is UGLY I'm
sure), and we also
get a valuable 5250-to-web gateway.  Since the gateway is Open
Source/Free Software/
whatever, we could customize it for particular sites (like having a
top-level navigation
menu or the company's icon at the top, changing the colors, whatever). 
We also wouldn't
be trying to keep up with patches for the most-recent Mozilla version,
and we wouldn't have
to maintain a 5250 fork in the Mozilla tree (trust me, it would happen -
I'm sure we have
to play by mozilla's rules for IO, memory management, interfaces, etc.)

I wrote a little piece of code (which I can't find right now - blah)
that was a "front-end"
for tn5250 which displayed the output in HTML, although I didn't get as
far as accepting
input.  I did, however, add a flag to the terminal flags which has the
effect of instructing
the rest of the emulator that it couldn't update the display more than
once per input-
submit cycle.  This should still be in current versions of the code, and
it was such a
simple hack that I'd bet it still works.

And, since then, we cleaned up a bunch of areas of the code and I kept
the gateway idea
in the back of my head when modularizing stuff.  I think it would
definitely be easier to
attempt now.

-Jay 'Eraserhead' Felice

Hmm, thinking of making some time to work on this ;-)
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