solicitation for widgets

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Sat, 30 Jan 93 16:56:16 -0800
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9301310056.AA20060@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: solicitation for widgets
X-Md4-Signature: 9e9dd38a8c93ebb35e92c95c6f976f3e
Fellow WWW'ers,

If all goes as planned, X Mosaic will be expanded in the
not-too-distant future to be able to handle heterogeneous MIME
documents.  This capability will probably take the form of a MIME
"master widget" that will create child widgets to display various data
elements -- text, GIF images, JPEG images, MPEG movies, and so on.
The child widgets will in turn be able to have active elements of
their own...  a widget represent audio/basic will have a 'play'
button, a readout giving the duration of the audio clip, and so on.
Widgets representing unknown types will have controls to allow saving
the data to a local file or possibly passing it to an external
program.

So, we're going to need widgets to display as many different common
datatypes as possible -- for example, we plan to use Dan Connolly's
RTF widget for RTF data elements -- and we'd like to solicit pointers
to or donations of widgets that can display common data formats.  (Of
course, we're distributing full source for X Mosaic and its respective
parts every step of the way.)

The more widgets we don't have to write ourselves, the faster we can
get multimedia X Mosaic out the door and the more capabilities it can
have... so pointers or donations will be most appreciated.

Marc