Now for my opinion: the best content providers will be able to do via
the Web is "suggest" a look for documents. They readership may choose
to turn off all or any formatting tags. If you look at the HTML
specification, it purposefully allows forwards and backwards
compatibility by allowing browsers to simply read the text part of
the message. The browser can disregard any tags that it has not yet
implemented. The may not even get bold or italic. Yes, the reader
loses information. That is their choice to lose that information. The
beauty of this system is that we give access to most of the content
to all of the people. We can also introduce new constructs, such as
possibly, textured backgrounds, and as browser's capabilitys are
further expanded, the users will get better structured information.
Until that time, the content providers only choice is to wrap all
that information into a graphic.
Traditional content providers (book and magazine publishers) have
always been able to control exactly the output. That ability, with
the Web, will no longer exist. However, I believe with style sheets
and proper formatting information, users will choose to enable the
content providers style directives. Afterall, a bunch of monospaced,
single font text messages get pretty boring after awhile. :)
With the advent of high speed communications the desire to turn off
graphic viewing will become less costly. The choice though will, I
believe, always reside with the viewer and no longer with the content
provider.
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Greg Kostello
Software Engineer greg@pages.com
Pages Software Inc NeXT mail accepted
(619) 492-9050x217
http://www.pages.com/