Re: textured backgrounds

Murray Maloney (murray@sco.COM)
Thu, 19 Jan 95 16:51:10 EST

>
> I think we are in dangerous ideological territory, and I feel a bit
> schizophrenic about the issue myself. Murray is correct in saying that
> publishers want to impose their own look-and-feel on their documents,
> and their is value in this for both reader and publisher. It is useful
> both to me and to Freeman Publishers that I can identify a page of
> Scientific American from across the room.
>
> OCLC has certainly felt a substantial amount of pressure in its
> negotiations with publishers for this control over layout and
> aesthetic quality.
>
> And yet, the ability to deliver this capability conflicts with the
> user-defined flavor of the web, and indeed, the variety of hardware out
> there means that the control by originators will be constrained in any
> case.
>
> Is there a sensible middle ground that allows, but does not promote,
> such specification? Then the market place will be able to sort this
> out of its own accord.

Stu (and others)

What I have been saying all along is:

1) Browsers should provide mechanisms for the user
to override or negate formatting or processing
hints that are specified by the publisher or author.

2) Servers, HTML and the WWW community in general,
should provide mechanisms for the publisher or author
to specify formatting or processing hints in the
documents that they are providing over the WWW.

In other words, allow me (author) to do reasonable things
with my data, and allow me (reader) to ignore much/all
of what the author specified.

I kinda thought that that was middle ground. But we seem to keep
coming back to these questions.

Murray

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Murray C. Maloney Internet: murray@sco.com
Technical Publications Writer/Architect Uucp: ...uunet!sco!murray
SCO Canada, Inc. My Phone: (416) 960-4031
130 Bloor Street West, 10th Floor Fax: (416) 922-2704
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1N5 SCO Phone: (416) 922-1937
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Disclaimer: I'm speaking for myself. 'T ain't nobody else to blame but me.
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Member of IETF HTML Working Group (http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-spec/)
Member of SGML Open Internet and WWW Technical Committee
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