[Edbrowse-dev] Notify and Rerender

[Karl Dahlke <eklhad@comcast.net>]

I was going to document the rerender command, which I obviously need to do,
and I realize I'm not even sure how I want it to work.
The command itself is fine,
update the buffer if the active web page has changed out from under you -
but the question is, should the rerender ever just run ffor you on its own?
You may have no idea that the page is changing.
This is where it gets very very hard to shoehorn the page,
obviously made for sighted users, into our world.
A more accessible web page would be better, but we might not have that option.

Well I can't just update and notify you every time there is a change.
Recall my earlier example, where the page updates once a second.
We can't be spewing out
"line 12 has been updated" once a second.
And it could be more than that.
A page shoing stock prices in realtime -
I don't know how many updates per second that is.
On the other hand, should I just never tell you there has been a change,
and hope you someday invoke some javascript, which will force the rerender,
or type rr?
That doesn't seem right either.

I'm pretty confident that I shouldn't notify you of changes
to background screens (pushed onto the stack)
or screens in other sessions.
You'll see those changes when you switch over to them.
This question is only for the current screen.

I'm wondering if I should mark the time of the first change,
that perhaps you don't know about,
and if a rerender hasn't happened in one minute, or some such time interval,
then I force the rerender and tell you what lines have changed.
That might be the best compromise between reporting every single
asynchronous change and never saying a word.

Karl Dahlke