Re: Inlined image format

Tony Sanders <sanders@BSDI.COM>
Message-id: <199401252242.QAA02341@austin.BSDI.COM>
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To: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Inlined image format 
In-reply-to: David C. Martin's message of Tue, 25 Jan 1994 13:06:09 PST.
Refer-To: <199401252106.AA02557@library.ucsf.edu > 
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 1994 16:42:41 -0600
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@BSDI.COM>
Content-Length: 1432
> If, however, Mosaic is going to grow into a strong and robust
> implementation that supports the growing needs of its user community,
> the software developers at NCSA need to be aware of the real-world
> contraints and demands of real-world users.  Otherwise the entire
> exercise is merely software for its own sake.

I'm afraid you have the situation confused.  The NCSA is implementing a
protocol designed by the WWW community.  You must convince the WWW community
of developers and users that a feature is worthwhile, not the NCSA.  This
is not to deny the NCSA credit for their contributions, but seriously,
there is more involved here than just the NCSA and I applaud them for
recognizing that fact and being far-sighted enough to try and do the right
things for the long term success of the WWW project.

The goal of WWW is to build a distributed, global, hypertext system; not
to implement every "feature du jour" that comes along.  The correct, and
current, solution to this problem is to simply create a hypertext link to
the object in question.

If you want to do inlined everything then work on the HTML+ project.
Inlined everything is a *BIG* project and deserves much more thought than
we have given it here and if we are going to do it then we need to do it
right.  You can't expect to just say "hey! let's add 100,000 lines of
code to every browser" and have people start jumping up and down to do it.

--sanders