Newspaper on the Web (Was: hmmm... servers producing...)

Steinar Bang (steinarb@falch.no)
Thu, 3 Nov 1994 00:49:11 +0100

>>>> On Wed, 2 Nov 1994 17:18:27 +0100, "CyberWeb" <web@sowebo.CHARM.NET> said:

> I have been involved with a group who were contemplating setting
> up a WWW-based newspaper. One of their major concerns was how to
> get a satisfactory layout.

Mine would have been how to finance it...:-)

> In particular, many of the members wanted to be able to
> preserve the columnar style of classical newspapers.

I think that would be wrong. Electronic texts, hypertext, WWW pages,
what have you, are at their best when you have short texts (typically
a screenful) interlinked with links for linear reading as well as
cross references.

Now you would think that this was an ideal medium to present news
(real news as opposed to USENET), a better looking, easier to use,
alternative to the teletext systems found on many european TV
stations, if only you could resolve the financing bit

> I'd expect the <Table> tag to be good for this, but till
> that's widely supported, one approach that I demonstrated to
> the group was exactly that: pages done as gifs! And they liked
> it..

This is not good. In fact, this is bad. This means that they haven't
grasped the possibilities and limitations of the new medium.

This approach will give you good screenshots, when you're referred in
the trade rags, but it will not give you a usable Web newspaper.

- Steinar

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