Atari Life

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/u/mlvanbie/anime-list/ is what I have to type into my web browser to look at this site on Japanese animation. This state of affairs is plainly ridiculous. Web addresses can be more than double this length, and make one mistake and you won't find the site that you are looking for. This only results in many people shying away from the Internet, and computing in general, as they perceive it as technical and riddled with jargon. Even quoting your e-mail address can be a nightmare. This state of affairs needs to be looked at if the web is to become the universal information source we have been reading about.

If you have used a Mac or a PC to access the worldwide web, then you may know that you can drag an icon that represents a web site onto your desktop. Clicking on this will fire up your modem and browser, and take you directly to the site in question. I have an icon for the Atari Net Locator web site permanently sitting on my desktop.

Now that graphical user interfaces have been accepted as the best way to access computers, it would follow that this approach should be applied to web addresses. We have all seen hyperlinks in operation as we jump from site to site on the web. Wouldn't it be great if all web sites had an icon that contained the address of the web site? The web does do something similar to this at the moment; part of the address that you type in is translated, by the software, into the actual IP address of the server where the pages are located.

Wouldn't it be great if you could organise your web addresses just as you do your clip art library? At the moment, web browsers have bookmarks or hot-lists. You can record the address of a site once you have visited it. Subsequent visits then involve a lot less time spent bashing the keyboard and making sure that the character you needed was a full stop and not a backslash.

Magazines that list dozens of web sites in each issue could lead the way here. On their cover mounted floppy or CD ROM they could include the icons that have the embedded web addresses. You could then simply drag these to your desktop, or file them away in your places-to-visit folder. Web sites themselves could follow suite. When you connect to a site for the first time, you could have the option to download an icon for the site, so that future visits can be made with a single mouse-click.

If you have been on the web for some time you will have accumulated a great deal of web addresses. Periodically I have to sort through my favourite places menu and discard those that I no longer need to visit, if I can remember what they are of course. Programs are available that help you to organise this mess into something a little more orderly. But, following the icon idea, it would be great to have a filofax type programme where each of the icons could be saved. You usually have a good idea of what site you are looking for, so finding this in the organiser shouldn't be a problem. Browsers could then be modified so that you could then drag the icon to the browser and then be automatically connected to the site.

I have recently been reading about Microsoft Active X technology. It is ideally suited to this idea, as it gives applications Internet connectivity. So following the filofax idea, you would simply have to double click on the icon of your choice. With the Active X control code embedded in the organiser, it would start your comm's software, log onto the site, and open your browser. Of course you could turn this around, and have the organiser embedded in the browser itself.

This technology could work across platforms. You wouldn't need state of the art kit to do this. We all know that the processing power of your PC isn't really the issue when it comes to the Internet, the real limits are the speed of your modem and the connection to the host server. Once again our trusty TOS machines could lead the way.

So, all you TOS programmers out there, what do you think? Could we pioneer this revolution in web access from our humble desktops? The Atari browser technology is getting better and better as the months go by. With the whole of the Internet industry still in its infancy we have the chance to pioneer some rather neat technology. Netscape and Microsoft are battling over the PC desktop at the moment. But their browsers are well advanced. Perhaps TOS developers could think ahead of these two and come up with a better way of accessing web sites without all that typing?

TOS emulation is now just a mouse click away, I know of many users who use their Mac or PC to run their TOS software. Wouldn't it be odd if we had this kind of icon driven access to web sites via TOS emulation on either a Mac or a PC? Until then, it's back to the keyboard.

Dave Howell

Atari Life

© 1996 FaST Club, Nottingham, UK