Re: Whitespace
marca@eit.COM (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 94 22:51:08 PST
From: marca@eit.COM (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9401130651.AA10778@eit.COM>
To: Bob Stayton <bobs@sco.com>
Cc: WIGGINS@msu.edu, janssen@parc.xerox.com, www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Whitespace
In-reply-to: <9401122230.aa28262@srv425b.sco.com>
References: <9401122230.aa28262@srv425b.sco.com>
Content-Length: 1352
Bob Stayton writes:
> > I think people want to be able to transmit the same sort of
> > documents over networks that they read on paper. Documents
> > rendered by Mosaic are such a leap forward over the old
> > flat ASCII titles with images as separate titles that our
> > collective appetite has been whetted; it's not posters
> > people want to deliver, it's glossy magazine articles with
> > sound and video attachments. It's anything that you can
> > do on a CD ROM.
Amen.
> I think trying to get HTML to deliver fully-formatted
> slick magazines is like trying to make your car fly.
> You could probably do it, but why bother when there
> are perfectly good airplanes out there? And you
> probably wouldn't have a very good car when you were done.
>
> As stated before, HTML documents are intended to be viewed
> on a variety of platforms in viewers of varying
> capabilities. Delivering fully formatted documents (let
> alone multimedia) in a platform-independent format is a
> very tough problem. But Adobe has taken a crack at it with
> Acrobat. Instead of trying to get HTML to do things
> it wasn't designed for, why not deliver a PDF Content-type
> and spawn an Acrobat reader? Let's leverage the work
> that has already been done.
Acrobat isn't free and/or ubiquitous, and Acrobat doesn't provide
network-wide hypermedia.
Marc