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Jun 30, 2002, 3:46am

Please can we have some rationale applied to the web window? When its
hidden, the page is kept active, but when its reshown, the page is
refreshed. This is especially a pain with streaming media, where hiding the
window doesn't terminate the content but it restarts if the user shows the
window again.

The *logical* solution is to terminate the page when its hidden, but in this
case I'd prefer it to be kept active (swings and roundabouts really as
sometimes it would be preferable for it to terminate and sometimes not).
Unfortunately, we seem to have half of one side and half of the other at the
moment and it makes it pretty much impossible to guarantee the results at
the client side. Of course, my current woes with the streaming would go away
if AW fancied implementing SureStream RealAudio support within the browser
heh heh.

While I'm in a "wish" phase and on the subject of the web window, there are
two other things that come to mind...

Firstly there's the "Target" argument. Now considering that the window needs
to be kept quite small to keep some reasonable access to the 3D and chat
windows, I would imagine that the vast majority of people use the "Target"
argument primarily to open a new browser window. But the web window opens at
the same time (and the address bar of the integrated browser is changed to
the new url without changing the page content), meaning you have to make
sure that the integrated browser has at least *some* content so it doesn't
look bad. Not forcing the web window open when the target isn't for that
window would clean things up nicely.

Secondly, there's the SDK aw_url_send method, which only seems to set the
url for the web window and not activate the window itself if its not
visible. The url isn't called until the web window is opened. Again, this
seems a bit half and half to me. I would expect (personal opinion) that
either the window would open or the page would load in the background.

Ideally for me, a couple of additional optional arguments to the browser's
URL action command and the SDK aw_url_send method would be just dandy, to
indicate (a) whether to open a new IE/Netscape(?) window directly and (b)
whether to open the web window on either a browser click/whatever or receipt
of an SDK command.

This seems to have turned into a bit of an essay but I really don't get on
with this window at all. Linking to the "outside world" through the web
window has such potential in a controlled environment but its hard to
exploit that potential with the way it stands at the moment.

Grims.

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