Re: Whitespace

Marc Andreessen (marca@eit.COM)
Wed, 12 Jan 94 22:51:08 PST


Bob Stayton writes:
> > 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.

Amen.

> 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.

Acrobat isn't free and/or ubiquitous, and Acrobat doesn't provide
network-wide hypermedia.

Marc