tkWWW TODO list

Short term projects

Here is a list of things that I joe@athena.mit.edu am actively working on.

Incorporate arTCLs into tkWWW - Artcls is a news reader that's written in tcl. It might be a good idea to somehow incorporate it into tkWWW.
Completely rewrite the message dialog routines
Adding list items is somewhat awkward
Loading and saving files is also quite awkward
The editor doesn't work with the "P" tag

Here is a list of what other people are working on

Jon Hurley (jon@biosym.com) is working on a SGML parser for TCL. Incorporating the parser would greatly improve the speed of TCL accesses. The only problem with this parser is that will require recomplilation of the wish executable.

Here is a list of things that need to be done, if you are interested in helping to any of these projects or if you have any ideas for improving tkWWW that are not on the list, feel free to send me (joe@athena.mit.edu) email, so that I can make sure that there isn't any duplication of effort.

Find graceful way of exiting in the middle of a retrieve
Delete bookmarks still not functional
Combine save source and save text into one dialog
Use canvas widget to provide a visual history with branching from one hypertext node to the next. Make history mechanism more sophisticated in general.
Get the imbedded hypertext figure stuff to work again
Make all of this work with 16-bit fonts so that we can read Chinese

Long term goals

The long term goal is to have tkWWW become a "swiss army knife" of networked computing. tkWWW will be a single tool used to perform functions which today are accomplished by separate systems. These functions will include

word processing
directory navigation
file transfer and
news reading
mail reading

Combining these tools into one tool will be advantageous because it will provide the user with a standard interface to these functions, as will as allow these tools to interact in a way that makes the combination more useful than the tools existing separately. For example, a person who wishes to announce a software package can post an article which contains a link to an ftp site. By simply clicking on that link, a user will be able to download that package, instead of having to manually perform several separate steps.