Re: proposed new tag: IMG

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Message-id: <8fYdFxYB0KGWA2qi9Q@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
Date: 	Mon, 1 Mar 1993 14:55:57 PST
Sender: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
From: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
To: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Subject: Re: proposed new tag: IMG
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <9303012105.AA15363@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
References: <9303010929.AA12454@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
	<9303012105.AA15363@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>

Excerpts from ext.WorldWideWeb: 1-Mar-93 Re: proposed new tag: IMG Marc
Andreessen@ncsa.uiu (884)

> Actually, maybe we should think about a general-purpose procedural
> graphics language within which we can embed arbitrary hyperlinks
> attached to icons, images, or text, or anything.  Has anyone else seen
> Intermedia's capabilities wrt this?  It's one of their most impressive
> capabilities, actually.

Other systems to look at which have this (fairly valuable) notion are
Andrew and Slate.  Andrew is built with _insets_, each of which has some
interesting type, such as text, bitmap, drawing, animation, message,
spreadsheet, etc.  The notion of arbitrary recursive embedding is
present, so that an inset of any kind can be embedded in any other kind
which supports embedding.  For example, an inset can be embedded at any
point in the text of the text widget, or in any rectangular area in the
drawing widget, or in any cell of the spreadsheet.  Each ``embedding''
consists of some direct information which specifies the display area of
the embedded information, and a pointer to the actual data object
(actually, in most current usage the embedded data object is directly
contained, but references do in fact work).

This business about embedding the display information is interesting, as
it seems to contradict the standard separation of data and display so
pervasive in Andrew.  In Andrew text, embedded insets are thought of as
single characters in rather strange fonts, so the rectangular area
information tells the text display widget the size of the ``character''.
 Similarly for embedded insets in the drawing widget.

Bill