Re: Inlined image format

Jonathan Abbey <broccol@arlut.utexas.edu>
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 13:21:35 -0600
From: Jonathan Abbey <broccol@arlut.utexas.edu>
Message-id: <199401261921.NAA07838@csdsun1.arlut.utexas.edu>
To: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Inlined image format
Content-Length: 2493
> Date: Wed, 26 Jan 94 12:33:00 PST
> From: Fisher Mark <uunet!tcemail!is3.indy.tce.com!FisherM@dxmint.cern.ch>
> Subject: Re: Inlined image format
> To: www-talk <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
> Message-Id: <2D46D4C3@MSMAIL.INDY.TCE.COM>
> 
> I hate to be MS Windows-centric (although OLE 2.0 is going to be on NT & the 
> Mac), but it looks to me like the OLE 2.0 inlined image capability would 
> certainly help with this.  As far as I understand it (which may not be far 
> enough :( ), under OLE 2.0 a browser that did not know how to process an 
> image format could essentially "loan" a child window to an external viewer 
> for display of the image, thus producing what looks to the user like the 
> current inlined image display but is actually an image displayed by an 
> external viewer.  Does anyone know if the OpenDoc specification allows for 
> this?

I have read that OpenDoc is a functional superset of OLE 2.0, so I
believe the answer here is yes.

The X window system's basic architecture is itself very well suited for
the loaning of child windows to other applications.  The problem is that
heretofore there has not been a defined protocol for such sharing.  I believe
that X11R6 (with the Fresco C++ OO toolkit) will provide some explicit
support for this kind of mechanism.

The external-viewer-in-a-browser-window stuff, while conceptually wonderful,
doesn't strike me as so terribly important.  I think that image filters
can do the job just as well (Mosaic or whatever calls a filter with the
data and gets back a GIF file, for instance).  The important thing is to
have some kind of standard way to represent any kind of linear transformations
that such a filter might induce, so that polygonal regions defined as buttons
in the image will be properly mapped to the resulting GIF image.

Of course, if we went to a system where we could have active objects such
as PostScript programs embedded in HTML documents, then we would need to
talk about such an embedding system.

> ======================================================================
> Mark Fisher                            Thomson Consumer Electronics
> fisherm@tcemail.indy.tce.com           Indianapolis, IN

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Abbey				               broccol@arlut.utexas.edu
Applied Research Laboratories                 The University of Texas at Austin
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------