[11744] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Random Thoughts Regarding RSA/NCSA/EIT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Hal R. Varian)
Sat Apr 16 20:29:50 1994
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 1994 14:32:13 -0400
From: "Hal R. Varian" <hrv@merit.edu>
To: merit.com-priv@merit.edu
In article <Pine.3.85.9404150914.A13673-0100000@hmmm> "Rob Raisch, The Internet Company" <raisch@internet.com> writes:
(various things omitted)
>Mosaic has other problems as a useful platform for Internet commerce, not
>the least of which is the fact that comparitively few users of the global
>Internet have access to workstations supporting the necessary
>capabilities to run Mosaic in any reasonable fashion. How big a pipe is
>required to REALLY run Mosaic?
The important thing about Mosaic is not Mosaic, but the HTTP protocol.
As I'm sure you know you can browse an HTML document using Mosaic,
lynx, w3.el, or several other browsers. I commonly use text-based
browsers and it works just fine.
>Mosaic is really a poor publishing platform -- if you talk to publishers
>-- because it allows the consumer too much control over the presentation
>and structuring of information. Publishing is really the imposition of
>control over the creative chaos of the author. Control over content.
>Control over presentation. Control over distribution and access.
>
>---------
>
>When I first showed Mosaic to a newspaper publisher, he was excited by
>its capabilities. In fact, the response was overwhelming until I
>demonstrated Mosaic's option to change the presentation font. My
>publisher friend's jaw hit the floor. I then resized the window to show
>other tools and Mosaic dutifully reformated all of the document's
>elements to fit in the window. I thought my friend would faint.
>Needless to say, he was less excited when he left -- by at least an order
>of magnitude.
>
>---------
>
>Mosaic is a publishing tool designed by technologists, not publishers.
>This is a problem. A big one.
You are right that Mosaic in its current form is not the right tool
for publishing formatted documents. But it's a fine vehicle for
serving up formatted documents---which is the way that it is mostly used.
