Re: Standardizing new HTML features

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 93 18:09:42 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9304272309.AA08657@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: Bill Janssen <janssen@parc.xerox.com>
Cc: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, mcrae@lib.ucsf.edu,
        www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Standardizing new HTML features
In-reply-to: <YfrM5dMB0KGWM3jKU3@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
References: <9304271134.AA02979@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
	<YfrM5dMB0KGWM3jKU3@holmes.parc.xerox.com>
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Bill Janssen writes:
> :a 27-Apr-93 Standardizing new HTML feat.. Dave_Raggett@hplb.hpl.hp (1221)
> 
> >     o   embedded images with text flow etc.
> 
> It would be particularly nice if we got this right.  There was an
> exchange a couple of months ago (beginning of March) that you (Dave)
> were a part of, about allowing arbitrary embedded ``things'', with
> their data being either specified in-line, or being included from
> another document.  These things could be images or animations or
> audio or text or whatever.  Marc mentioned several problems to be
> solved (I remember circular references, for example).

Yup, and I got jumped on (justifiably so, I suppose :-).  What
concerns me is not necessarily circular references (as Guido pointed
out at the time, that's easily avoidable) but rather the precedent and
mechanism this puts in place for making documents arbitrarily complex
in terms of the network connections needed to put them together on the
client side.  Inlined images located on other servers are bad enough
-- if we start making generic inclusions available, things are going
to get hairy.  IMHO.

Plus, this is hypertext -- most times, generic inclusions shouldn't be
per se necessary, or even necessarily useful compared to a hyperlink.

Also, I'm not certain that any multimedia data other than images needs
to be specifiable as inlined/included.  Things like audio and MPEG can
simply be pointed at from an anchor (as Mosaic does) and forked to
external viewers or processed internally, whichever the browser
prefers -- and with inlined images the whole thing will be iconic
anyway.

I would certainly love to hear discussion about what to do with text
flow -- it's starting to become a popular request.

Cheers,
Marc