Re: Various HTML questions

"Jon P. Knight" <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>
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Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 15:23:39 +0200
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From: "Jon P. Knight" <J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: Various HTML questions
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On Tue, 3 May 1994 lilley@vax5.graphics.manchester-computing-centre.ac.uk wrote:
> <? rant>
> I also feel that the world has moved on a ways since CERN started the WWW 
> project. All this insistence on "we have absolutely no way of knowing what a 
> renderer will do with this" reminds me of the GKS specification. When it was 
> first being written, graphics output devices were so massively variable in 
> capabilities - like, some could only erase the whole screen, not parts of it - 
> that saying nothing about presentation  was the only way. By the time the spec 
> came to be published, things has settled down. Raster graphics were standard and 
> widely available, as was colour.
> 
> We can now assume at least a bitmapped screen, can we not? And a PostScript 
> printer or some approximation thereto? The major platforms - Unix with X, PCs 
> with Windows and Macs with the Mac interface - and also the minor ones (OpenVMS 
> with X, Atari ST and Amiga) all provide this. It has become standard. Bending 
> over backwards to support a 40 column caps-only text terminal seems a lot of 
> hassle for little gain. This is the 90s, not the 70s, or didn't we learn 
> anything?
> <? /rant>
> 

Hmm, tell that to all the people with text only terminals in their offices
who have to use lynx or WWW.  And there are a fair few thousand of those. 
Also those bitmapped screens vary wildly in their capabilities; my little
Mac Classic has a 1 bit deep bitmapped display whereas the Sun I'm typing
this on has 24 bit colour (and is a damn sight bigger to boot).

The one thing we learnt (hopefully) from the 70's was to target the core
of a protocol to the widest user base possible.  If TCP/IP only ran on the
equivalent of modern PCs and workstations, I wonder whether it would have
taken off so much?

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* Its not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important. *