Active Documents

One nice thing about the web is that documents can be active; that is, you can not only retrieve a document but send a query to a remote program.

The program may return a particular document, or even generate the returned document on the fly.

For example, the Indiana CS Tech Report Index is an active document that searches its TR index, returning the result as a web document on the fly.

Warren Toomey wkt@cs.adfa.oz.au, April 1994