Re: Whitespace

Bob Stayton (bobs@sco.com)
Wed, 12 Jan 94 22:30:17 PST

> From: Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
>
> I think people want to be able to transmit the same sort of
> documents over networks that they read on paper. Documents
> rendered by Mosaic are such a leap forward over the old
> flat ASCII titles with images as separate titles that our
> collective appetite has been whetted; it's not posters
> people want to deliver, it's glossy magazine articles with
> sound and video attachments. It's anything that you can
> do on a CD ROM.

I think trying to get HTML to deliver fully-formatted
slick magazines is like trying to make your car fly.
You could probably do it, but why bother when there
are perfectly good airplanes out there? And you
probably wouldn't have a very good car when you were done.

As stated before, HTML documents are intended to be viewed
on a variety of platforms in viewers of varying
capabilities. Delivering fully formatted documents (let
alone multimedia) in a platform-independent format is a
very tough problem. But Adobe has taken a crack at it with
Acrobat. Instead of trying to get HTML to do things
it wasn't designed for, why not deliver a PDF Content-type
and spawn an Acrobat reader? Let's leverage the work
that has already been done.

bobs
Bob Stayton 425 Encinal Street
Technical Publications Santa Cruz, CA 95060
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (408) 425-7222
bobs@sco.com