lynx-dev Client side pull, revisited

[Sebastiaan van Erk]

Hi,

I know this has been on the list before, and I've read the policy on client
side pull in the user manual, but I was still wondering if it couldn't be
useful to support it (fully) as an option.

I know that W3C says that one should not RELY on the HTTP-EQUIV="refresh"
to work, and that one should also always include content in the body of
a page so that a user does not get stranded, and I even agree that the
use of this feature to redirect is completely silly.

However, I am writing an application in which I have user sessions (which
expire after a certain amount of time). Now it would be very nice for the
users if their session were not to expire while their browser points to
the page in question. The only way I can think of achieving this is through
client side pull. If the page is refreshed (say once every 20 mins), then
the session stays alive (as long as the user is on the page), and dies (as
it should) if the user kills their browser without logging out properly.

In my opinion it would be a good solution to have a configuration option
much like the ACCEPT_ALL_COOKIES, that allows client side pull, which can
be off by default. I was even thinking along the line of maybe two options,
one which also allows the user also HIDE the "pseudo"-link. (It can be very
irritating to always land on the "pseudo"-link every time you load the page,
causing extra an extra keypress to be necessary to select the first form field.)

I really tried to make this application lynx-friendly (in fact, I would
like to recommend lynx as the browser of choice for it), but currently the
session expiration problem is causing users to choose another browser.

Of course, if anyone has a BETTER solution than client-side-pull, I am open
to suggestions.

Greetings,
Sebastiaan van Erk

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