Re: Standardizing new HTML features

Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>
Message-id: <9304291641.AA29221@austin.BSDI.COM>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Standardizing new HTML features 
In-Reply-To: "(Arnold Bloemer)"'s message of 28 Apr 93 07:40:00.
Organization: Berkeley Software Design, Inc.
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 11:41:29 -0500
From: Tony Sanders <sanders@bsdi.com>

> From "(Arnold Bloemer)" <bloemer@tnt.uni-hannover.dbp.de>
> > From marca@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu Wed Apr 28 01:17:16 1993
> > ...
> > 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.
> 
> But it is much more impressive and intuitive, when you click on an
> image and it starts moving in place. Paradise Software Inc. have a demo
> which shows a hypermedia newspaper. In that demo there are two images 
> which serve as anchors to two movies. When you start the movies they 
> will run at the location of the images. I showed the demo to a couple 
> of people and all were very impressed.
There are two parts to this, auto-inlining and inlining on selection.

There is nothing to prevent browers from inlining on selection right now,
though it would be nice if you could pass a window id to xv and not have
to build in all that code.  Having browsers and external viewers cooperate
should be an easy project.  Any volunteers?

I think in 10 years auto-inlining anchors (for other than iconic purposes,
which is what <A><IMG...></A> really does) will be considered the GOTO of
hypertext.  Good document design should minimize them, but they are handy
when you are in deep shaving cream.

see also: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/Elements/A.html

It talks about REL=Embed which is pretty interesting for doing outlines.

> > I would certainly love to hear discussion about what to do with text
> > flow -- it's starting to become a popular request.
> I would like this feature also very much.
Wouldn't adding a <IMG ALIGN="flow"> hint do the job?  I haven't researched
all the different ways people like to flow text around images but I think
this would solve 80% of the problem (which is that people don't want all
that empty space).  I don't see anything preventing browsers from flowing
text right now.

--sanders