;;; info.mhtml: -*- Meta-HTML -*- 

;;;  Copyright (c) 1996 Brian J. Fox
;;;  Author: Brian J. Fox (bfox@ai.mit.edu) Sat Aug 17 08:38:57 1996.
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    <h0><quicktalk>, a <meta-html> Chat Room</h0>
    How long does it take you to write a (admittedly weak) Chat Room in
    the language of your choice?  At the urgings of
    <b>Michael Ramsey</b>, <b>Dave Guzemann</b>, and <b>Lonnie
    Sciambi</b>, and, after 2 hi-test thought lubricating libations, I
    decided to show these fellows why I didn't want to write a Chat Room
    which relied only on HTML.  So I spent 1 hour and 20 minutes
    building <a href="<get-var mhtml::url-to-dir>/">this Chat Room</a>.

    Mind you, those 80 minutes included listening to my days worth of
    phone messages, making plans for the evening with my friend
    <b>Erika</b>, reading my 6 hour backlog of E-Mail, and calling
    <a href="http://www.ua.com/~hqm/">Henry Minsky</a> to get his feedback,
    and to see if he knew the magic <b>"target="</b> name to get the
    parent frame from a <b>POST</b>.  (He didn't know, but I looked it
    up; it's <b>_parent</b>.... how about that?)

    <h0>Room Construction</h0> I wrote the <b>welcome.mhtml page</b>
    first, and then I wrote two macros.  Finally, I wrote the
    <b>chat.mhtml</b> top level page, the <b>chatbox.mhtml</b> page,
    and the <b>chathist.mhtml</b> window.  Then I filled in the end
    time on the front page, ate pizza, and watched a movie with Erika.

    There are about <b>60 lines of code</b> that implement the chat
    mechanism in two simple macros.  <b><code>chat::add-to-history</code></b>
    simply stores posted data in a database, keeping that database
    shrunk down to about 100 entries, and
    <b><code>chat::chat-history</code></b>
    displays the <i>x</i> most recent entries in a table format.  Big deal.

    <font size=-1>
    <a href="http://www.ua.com/~bfox/">Brian J. Fox</a>
    </font>

    <a href="<get-var mhtml::url-to-dir>/">
      <b>Back to <quicktalk></b>...
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