News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community.
	Questions about NetCaster

By Wesley Felter, wesf@mail.utexas.edu.

I have a few questions about Netscape's NetCaster push-media system. If anyone from Netscape would like to provide some details, I'd be interested to hear them (and post them on this page).

As I understand it, you can use a dialog to indicate that you'd like Communicator to download a page at a certain interval. How are images handled? Does Communicator scan the page for images and download them also?

Is it possible to pull a whole site or part of a site without specifying each page individually? For example, I'd like to have my browser download http://www.scripting.com/ every day, along with all the pages that it links to that are on the same server. Even if I can specify complex rules like that one, it might not be as precise as letting the Webmaster specify which pages get downloaded. What if there's a link on http://www.scripting.com/ that points to a page which has a link to another page. Dave could know whether I'd be likely to read that page, because he knows the content it contains. Telling the browser to download an entire site isn't feasible in this scenario.

Can non-page items be pulled? I'd love to be able to push BinHex files and FileMaker databases, but you can't see those in a browser.