Re: More than just HTML (was Re: Poetry and Maths)

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Message-id: <9305271537.AA23382@eitech.com>
X-Sender: weber@eitech
Date: Thu, 27 May 1993 08:43:09 -0800
To: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
From: weber@eitech.com (Jay Weber)
Subject: Re: More than just HTML (was Re: Poetry and Maths)
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
X-Mailer: <PC Eudora Version 1.1a5>

At 09:53 AM 5/27/93 BST, Dave_Raggett wrote:
>My suggestion is that we follow the approach taken with the PC and allow
>object level embedding in HTML. This basically means you keep HTML small
>and simple while allowing people to embed figures etc. in a foreign format.
>The embedding uses a link like Mosaic's <IMG> tag.

Good idea, that's a very important hook.  Can we end up making IMG just
a special case, or at least just an alias?

>The embedded data can
>be sent along with the main document using MIME's multipart capability.

Right, this will be significantly more efficient for some retrieval
mechanisms (especially when authentication and authorization is involved),
and a little nicer for servers to organize their documents.

How do you plan on doing this in HTML+?  Sounds like the first part
will be text/html, where the anchors reference other parts.  The reference
can be done by defining a URL access type of "part", e.g. HREF=part:XXX
where XXX is a Content-id.

>This approach also allows simple browsers to negotiate the format, so
>that the server can be asked to render equations into bitmaps etc.

This is somewhat in conflict with bundling as multiparts, since the
negotiation would need to be when asking for the compound document
(which is before the browser expects to get a specific obscure type).

Jay Weber
EIT