The recent sending of attachments in this unicode discussion group has led me to think once again about my idea for a specialized type of website. In view of the fact that, although I can do some client side JavaScript, I have no knowledge of server side scripting, I do not know whether my idea is feasible or, if it is feasible, whether it is a relatively quick task for someone who has the right skills or a major task. Although the idea was originated as a suggested infrastructural tool for the construction of distance education packages by an informal team of people located around the world, it also potentially has applications for this unicode community, so I wondered if perhaps some of the participants of this discussion group might perhaps be willing to comment. If the Unicode Consortium would like to implement the idea, then great.
Here is the idea in general terms. It is called a teleutopia webspace: the word teleutopia has five syllables, tel - eu - top - i - a and is formed by joining the prefix tel- to the word eutopia. A teleutopia webspace can be used to produce a teleutopia of people individually working at a distance in an informal manner to produce a combined result. All users of the web would be able to access a website, say, for an example here to explain the idea, www.somewhere.com and upon reaching that site an automated system would generate and display a web page that includes two lists of files, each file name in each list provided as a hyperlink, as the home page of the website. The first list is a list of all of the files that have a .htm suffix that are in the home directory of the website at that time. The second list is a list of all files that have any suffix other than .htm that are in the home directory of the website at that time. Registered users of the www.somewhere.com website are able to send emails, each email being an email that has one and only one attachment, to [EMAIL PROTECTED] which is an automated receiving system. The automated receiving system takes the attachment and stores it in the home directory of the www.somewhere.com webspace, either under the name that the attachment carried or, if that name is already taken, under the next sequentially available name of a local standard naming system. The idea is that a registered user of the facility can look through the www.somewhere.com website to find graphics and web pages to which to link as hypertext links, generate on his or her local computer a .htm file including those graphics and links, then email the .htm file as an attachment to [EMAIL PROTECTED] whereupon it will be received and placed in the home directory of the www.somewhere.com website, and thus be shown on the home page of www.somewhere.com for each subsequent web access, by anyone, of the www.somewhere.com website. That is only a simple example of use. A person could add new graphics, Java applets and so on to the www.somewhere.com website by this email method, and then use them in his or her own page and thus also make them available for other registered users of the www.somewhere.com website. This example uses a simple scenario where the information in the email other than the attachment is ignored. If someone implements the idea of a teleutopia webspace then he or she might possibly consider using the information in the email to add other features, such as sending the original sender of the email a deletion code so that he or she may later delete a particular file or send an updated version of it. If someone does implement such features could he or she please note that one possible use of a teleutopia webspace is so that people can submit a portfolio of work for assessment for a distance education qualification, in which case the files need to be sent as "undeletable" so that any review or assessment is based on the files submitted at a particular time and that the provenance of such a review or assessment cannot be retrospectively undermined by the files which were reviewed or assessed being altered: so, if a deletion facility is included, please also implement an option that a submitted file may be stated to be undeletable and so marked in the list that appears on the www.somewhere.com webspace. Such a website might perhaps be useful to the participants in this discussion group, so that when several people each send in graphics of glyphs for a discussion, a web page could be constructed that showed all of the graphics displayed on one page, together with hyperlinks to relevant documents that are either in the same webspace or are available at other sites on the web. William Overington 1 February 2002 www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo
