[11325] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Living on the tiles (was Re: How Long to a Multimedia Internet?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Davis)
Tue Mar 29 08:57:59 1994
Date: Mon, 28 Mar 1994 16:40:36 -0500
From: Christopher Davis <ckd@kei.com>
To: Paul Robinson <PAUL@tdr.com>
Cc: com-priv@lists.psi.com
In-Reply-To: <01.1994Mar28.04h34m07s.PAUL-0100000@TDR.COM>
PR> == Paul Robinson <PAUL@tdr.com>
PR> So it applies here. If something like Mosaic had been designed for a
PR> slower terminal line, it would have been designed so that it would
PR> only send data as things changed, would send and use line drawing and
PR> area drawing primitives such as squares, rectangles, circles or
PR> whatever, would have standard defined fonts and so on. So that you
PR> send as little information as you can, and only when you have to.
PR> This allows you to effectively increase the bandwidth. But you have
PR> to design for that.
Except for the pictures (and, I will note, you can delay or inhibit
picture loading at the *client* end), Mosaic displays HTML, which is, for
all intents and purposes, a simple markup language. HTML documents look
something like the following:
================================================================
<html> <head>
<title>A Short, Semi-Guided Tour of the Internet</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>A Short, Semi-Guided Tour of the Internet</h1>
This is mostly a set of pointers to various web sites which are
interesting, unique, or just plain fun.<p>
While the Internet began as a research & education network, it has
grown to encompass far more than just universities and laboratories. The
information available over the <a
href="http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html">World Wide
Web</a> (the newest means of Internet information publishing) is a
microcosm of the "new" global Internet.
================================================================
While the above is incomplete (it's the first bit of a larger document, so
the </body> tag is missing; it doesn't use even a large subset of the tags
in HTML; etc, etc) it gives you the idea. Inline pictures are not
included with the document, instead taking the form of directives like
<img src="http://www.kei.com/homepages/ckd/ckdface.gif" ALT="me">. Your
client can choose not to display it, or display a 'hint' as to the content
of the picture if one is supplied (with the ALT= parameter).
While there is not (yet) a commonly-implemented inline picture format such
as you describe (a command-based format as opposed to GIF or XPM), such is
certainly possible. The Mac Mosaic can display PICT format images, for
example.
As for sending data "only as things changed", that is already the case.
Both the Mac and X versions of Mosaic cache recently accessed pages and/or
images.
I see a lot of discussion of Mosaic and HTTP and perceived
"inefficiencies", but it seems to me that the inefficiencies being
discussed on com-priv are misperceptions, not actual problems. (While I
do feel there are inefficiencies in Mosaic & HTTP, they are related to the
lack of a multi-transaction mode in HTTP similar to sendmail V8's SMTP
connection caching.)
