Re: Internet Draft for FIG

Brian Behlendorf (brian@organic.com)
Fri, 4 Aug 95 20:11:25 EDT

On Fri, 4 Aug 1995, Dave Raggett wrote:
> I will send out a short Internet Draft on the HTML3 FIG specification
> towards the end of next week. It seems pretty solid so may be we can
> look forward to an RFC in the not too distant future?
>
> The specification will be unchanged from the current HTML3 Internet Draft.

Excellent.

On the subject of imagemaps - for those of you who have looked with Sun's
home page using HotJava, you'll see they have implemented for Java
browsers an applet implementing imagemap-on-steroids: some object phrases
highlight when your mouse passes over them, other objects do other
animations, etc. This is all wonderfully cute, the applet was *very*
large - furthermore, with the content of the imagemap inseparable from
the implementation, I wondered if it didn't behoove us to create a more
complex client-side imagemap specification that could perform the same
functions they found useful. In essence, most of the attractive
functionality could be accomplished with being able to specify URI's to
objects which overlay the "hotarea" at some event, like when the mouse
passes over it, or when the area has already been visited. Combine that
with inline animations, and voila!

What I haven't resolved, is whether that belongs in the <FIG> element of
HTML (i.e., is this useful when the SRC attribute is something other than
an image), or whether this is sufficiently complex enough to warrent
implementing in an special "imagemap" file type, perhaps implemented as a
variant of PNG.

Thoughts?

Brian

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