Re: proposed new tag: IMG

• Mail folder: WWW Talk Jan-Mar 1993 Archives
• Next message: Marc Andreessen: "Re: proposed new tag: IMG "
• Previous message: Marc Andreessen: "binary file access via Mosaic"

Message-id: <9303131056.AA05476=guido@voorn.cwi.nl>
Subject: Re: proposed new tag: IMG 
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Date: Sat, 13 Mar 1993 11:56:26 +0100
From: Guido van Rossum <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>

>We're not prepared to support INCLUDE/EMBED at this point; it raises a
>number of nasty issues that are quite separate from the idea of
>inlined images.  For example, what happens if one EMBEDS a document
>that in turn EMBEDS the first document?  Oops.

I would consider this an error of the author that needs to be detected
to protect the browser.  It only requires maintaining a stack of
nested EMBEDS.

>Aside from this, I'm
>not sure I see the point in allowing arbitrary EMBED's for things like
>chunks of texts: this is a hypertext system, after all, and it ought
>to be possible to get the functional effect of an EMBED by using an
>ordinary link.  Right?

Some other hypertext systems do this, in a sense: in Guide there are,
apart from real GOTO stype hyperlinks, also "folds" (I think they are
called) which are sort of embedded documents that you can open and
close.  The advantage in certain situations is that opening a fold
retains more context than following a link.  It feels like using an
outline processor, which is rather pleasant (for certain kinds of
information).

--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <Guido.van.Rossum@cwi.nl>

PS. I keep hearing about supporting MIME.  Is there consensus on the
form this should take?  (I remeber getting in an unpleasant fight with
Dan Connolly about this once -- BTW is he still with us?)