Re: Generalizing Banners

From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 95 16:50:07 EDT

First, I want to thank Lou Montulli for bringing this issue to the group 
and asking for advice before implemention.  Let's make sure we encourage 
this, html-wg members....

On Sun, 20 Aug 1995, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
> In message <3036E492.2781@mozilla.com>, Lou Montulli writes:
> >My question to this group is what would be the best
> >syntactical way to add this expressive power to HTML?
> 
> Good question. And as usual, my minimalist answer is: this
> functionality doesn't require any changes to HTML at all. To make a
> comound document, I think you should aggregate simple documents,
> similar to the way HTML and GIFs are agregated, rather than making
> HTML more complex.

Agreed.

The arguments for Netscape engineers (or any other company) extending HTML
versus breaking clean and going with a new document language with various new
capabilities has been backwards compatibility and ease of authoring.  I.e.,
it's much easier for the average HTML author to learn to type <center>, and
for browsers to ignore it, than it is to get users to use PDF and force
everyone to use a PDF browser.  

However, those two conditions don't hold for this "aggregator" control 
we're looking for.  The expressive power that people will want will be 
far beyond the expressive power that a limited set of HTML tags can 
provide.  Furthermore, I can't imagine an implementation that won't look 
unacceptible in current browsers.  

So, now Netscape (and others working on this) need to find an acceptible 
"aggregation" language.  Something that simply described the individual 
parts and their relations on each other.  Something that I as a webmaster 
could apply content negotiation to, so that non-aggregate-language 
enabled browsers can get an equivalent page.

One place to start is with technology that is being implemented 
in your browser, Lou: PDF, Director, and Java.  Of these three, I would 
imagine that it would be the easiest to use Java as the aggregator 
language.  Java already has classes for parsing and rendering HTML (at 
least hopefully that will be part of the Netscape Java implementation), 
and has pretty nice (and getting nicer) UI classes.  The "easy to author" 
requirement could be met by implementing a nice 4GL UI contructor that 
creates Java code - in fact, make it a pseudo-HTML language using 
whatever HTML tags you had in mind for this proposal, and all will be 
well.  As a full turing machine language, Java could give everyone the 
expressive power they want, without placing the burden on the HTML tag 
set itself to become Director-for-the-masses.

> What I'm saying is that to achieve more powerful user interfaces,
> HTML isn't necessarily the only tool or even the best tool.

Exactly.

I look at the implementation of PDF and Director and Java into Netscape 
as Really Good News for this workgroup.

Thoughts?

	Brian

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