HTML

Abstract: A flowchart-based tool can be used to build a logical structure. In the context of a customer relationship management (CRM) system, the logical structure can comprise an ordered set of questions and branching logic that are presented to a customer of the business when the customer contacts the business with an inquiry, such as for a sale or service inquiry or other interaction. An engine can run a session associated with the logical structure, with the session presenting questions, text, graphics, and the like dynamically to customer across a network, such as the Internet and a web site. Branching logic determines the appropriate information to present to the user based on answers to previous questions. The engine allows presentation of the information to the user/customer, by generating hypertext markup language (HTML) files to display the questions or other elements of the logical structure as part of a user interface on a client terminal of the customer.

Abstract: A wireless communications device with a markup language based man-machine interface provides a user interface for telecommunications functionality, including dialing telephone numbers, answering telephone calls, creating messages, sending messages, receiving messages, establishing configuration settings defined in markup language such as HTML, and accessed through a browser program executed by the wireless communication device. This feature enables direct access to Internet and World Wide Web content, such as Web pages, to be directly integrated with telecommunication functions of the device, and allows Web content to be seamlessly integrated with other data types, since all data presented to the user via the user interface is presented via markup language-based pages. The browser processes an extended form of HTML that provides new tags and attributes that enhance the navigational, logical, and display capabilities of conventional HTML, and particularly adapt HTML to be displayed and used on wireless communication devices with small screen displays.

Abstract: The WorldWideWeb is less agent-friendly than we might hope. Most information on the Web is presented in loosely structured natural language text with no agent-readable semantics. HTML annotations structure the display of Web pages, but provide virtually no insight into their content. Thus, the designers of intelligent Web agents need to address the following questions: (1) To what extent can an agent understand information published at Web sites? (2) Is the agent's understanding sufficient to provide genuinely useful assistance to users? (3) Is site-specific hand-coding necessary, or can the agent automatically extract information from unfamiliar Web sites? (4) What aspects of the Web facilitate this competence? In this paper we investigate these issues with a case study using ShopBot, a fully-implemented, domainindependent comparison-shopping agent. Given the home pages of several online stores, ShopBot autonomously learns how to shop at those vendors. After learning, it is able to speedily visit over a dozen software and CD vendors, extract product information, and summarize the results for the user. Preliminary studies show that ShopBot enables users to both find superior prices and substantially reduce Web shopping time. Remarkably, ShopBot achieves this performance without sophisticated natural language processing, and requires only minimal knowledge about different product domains. Instead, ShopBot relies on a combination of heuristic search, pattern matching, and inductive learning techniques. PERMISSION TO COPY WITHOUT FEE ALL OR OR PART OF THIS MATERIAL IS GRANTED PROVIDED THAT THE COPIES ARE NOT MADE OR DISTRIBUTED FOR DIRECT COMMERCIAL ADVANTAGE, THE ACM copyRIGHT NOTICE AND THE TITLE OF THE PUBLICATION AND ITS DATE APPEAR, AND NOTICE IS GIVEN THAT COPYING IS BY PERMISSION OF ACM. To COPY OTHERWISE, OR TO REPUBLISH, REQUIRES A FEE AND/OR SPECIFIC PERMISSION. AGENTS '97 CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS, COPYRIGHT 1997 ACM.

Abstract: The maturation of the Web platform has given rise to sophisticated and demanding Web applications such as interactive 3D visualization, audio and video software, and games. With that, efficiency and security of code on the Web has become more important than ever. Yet JavaScript as the only built-in language of the Web is not well-equipped to meet these requirements, especially as a compilation target. Engineers from the four major browser vendors have risen to the challenge and collaboratively designed a portable low-level bytecode called WebAssembly. It offers compact representation, efficient validation and compilation, and safe low to no-overhead execution. Rather than committing to a specific programming model, WebAssembly is an abstraction over modern hardware, making it language-, hardware-, and platform-independent, with use cases beyond just the Web. WebAssembly has been designed with a formal semantics from the start. We describe the motivation, design and formal semantics of WebAssembly and provide some preliminary experience with implementations.