Can Python work for me?

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Alex Martelli:
> Steven Taschuk wrote:
  [...]
> > Well, you could run a special-purpose HTTP server on the client
> > machine, and have the print server send HTTP POSTs to that server
> > to inform it of job status, etc..  That's "inside" HTTP, in a
> > certain sense.
> 
> But the browser (specified by the OP) would STILL have to be
> constantly reloading: even though the constant reloading would
> be from a special-purpose server rather than from a general
> one, it still would violate the specs.

What I had in mind (but somehow managed not to mention, imply, or
allude to in my blurb above) was a browser that is
programmatically controllable by another process, which in my
little scenario would be the hypothetical special-purpose HTTP
server.  In the scenario I was imagining, the browser only makes
HTTP requests of the print server; the local weird server tells it
(by way of its programmatic interface) when to reload.

Then the browser and this weird HTTP server on the client together
form a system which can communicate with the print server over
HTTP in ways that are effectively not request-response.  This
kludge (or fudge, as you suggest) gets server-push functionality
on top of a protocol that, as you say, doesn't actually support it.

I readily admit, of course, that this scheme is almost certainly
of no use to the OP.

-- 
Steven Taschuk                                7\ 7'Z {&~         .
staschuk at telusplanet.net                        Y r          --/hG-
                                            (__/ )_             1^1`