Hi xmldiva,
you wrote:
>Again, with my web page example, you need an internet connection, whether
>you're using a browser, or doing the many of the internet things you can do
>with REBOL, like emailing, ftping, etc. So the fax/modem/WAN is assumed.
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Are you talking about a scenario, whereby
you would give REBOL a fax number and REBOL would dial up that number and
send some document as a fax?
I'm having difficulties associating REBOL with faxing because you can't run
REBOL on your fax machine. On the other hand, if you have two computers
communicating with each other, you can do smarter things with documents
then fax them back and forth. Basically, faxing is not a computer
technology. It's a black box type technology, similar to a microwave or an
espresso machine. The fact that computers can participate in fax
communications is kind of a crutch.
Faxing is also a very low-level, hardware dependent technology. Not only do
you need to access the modem directly as you would for a file transfer
application (such as xmodem), but modems are very inconsistent with respect
to whether, how, how reliably and to what degree they implement fax
protocols. Faxing is not supported on an OS level. Implementing fax support
that actually works is a veritable science in its own right.
To me faxing is as unrebolesque as printing, equipping REBOL with VT100
emulation, using REBOL to send outgoing pages to pagers or using REBOL to
implement an automated callback system, or voice mailbox (you know these
press 1 for sales, 2 for customer service, press 3 for your current account
balance) or voice recognition. These are all certainly types of
communcations applications, but not something you'd expect to attack with
REBOL. Or would you? Many of today's modems also support voice
communcations. Hardly a reason for REBOL to enter the voice communications
and voice recognition arena. Or is it?
On a brighter note, there are plenty of Fax applications out there - some
dlls - and I'm pretty sure that REBOL/command will be able to control a few
of them. Would that conceivably work for you? Which OS are you targeting?
Elan
