RE: coupla html+ possibilities

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 93 04:27:24 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9307070927.AA17191@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: wais@ecn.purdue.edu (Chris Davis)
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: RE: coupla html+ possibilities
In-reply-to: <9307061642.AA27991@ups.ecn.purdue.edu>
References: <9307061642.AA27991@ups.ecn.purdue.edu>
X-Md4-Signature: 4cb8a4a0480e36a9fc735e237e3be73b
Status: RO

Chris Davis writes:
> In Message-Id: <9307040959.AA09910@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
> Marc Andreessen writes:
> > 
> > (b) An optional parameter for <LI> to allow specification of a pointer
> >     to an image to inline (rather than using a bullet or whatever).
> >     This would let one do something like:
> > 
> >     <UL>
> >     <LI IMG="internal-gopher-menu"> A Gopher menu.
> >     <LI IMG="internal-gopher-image"> A weathermap.
> >     </UL>
> > 
> >     ... and then one would get a slick bitmap-enumerated list.  Again,
> >     text-based clients could substitute the normal list style or
> >     textual equivalents (e.g., "[menu]" and "[image]").
> 
> When a link points to a gopher file, isn't the information about
> what type of data being pointed to already provided in the URL?
> 
> e.g.  gopher://ecn.purdue.edu/I9/Some_nifty_graphic 
> 	Is known to be a "gopher-image" because of the I9.

Yup.

> I would think it wouldn't be too hard for the client to display a
> small bitmap instead of a bullet when it sees something like this in
> the link. 

Because the Gopher communications module simply produces a HTML stream
(either tokenized or raw) that looks like:

<ul>
<li> <a href="gopher://blahblah/blah">An entry.</a>
<li> <a href="gopher://blahblah/blah">An entry.</a>
<li> <a href="gopher://blahblah/blah">An entry.</a>
</ul>

...or something similar.  Yes, this could all be hacked so the Gopher
stuff is handled extra-special-different, but it would be much cleaner
to simply support the concept of arbitrary icons as bullets in
unnumbered lists.  I think.

> As soon as you move out of gopher provided information, the problem
> becomes very murky, and an optional parameter like the one you
> suggest would probably be just about the only way to do it without a
> lot of headaches.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu