Comments: Authenticated sender is <alaric+abwillms AT sdps DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
From: "Alaric B. Williams" <alaric AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
To: "Mike A. Harris" <mharris AT blackwidow DOT saultc DOT on DOT ca>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 19:28:50 +0000
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Subject: Re: [opendos] Wishlist v2.0
Reply-to: alaric AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk
CC: "..Nissim.." <nchudnof AT mbhs DOT edu>, OpenDOS <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
References: <199703230057 DOT BAA07350 AT magigimmix DOT xs4all DOT nl>
In-reply-to: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970327111151.186H-100000@capslock.com>
Message-ID: <859490764.0626642.0@abwillms.demon.co.uk>

On 27 Mar 97 at 11:15, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Mar 1997, yeep wrote:

> Yes, I must agree.  Due to the popularity of the WWW, and of the
> GUI browsers that are out there, I recommend that all future
> online documentation for OpenDOS (or anything else for that
> matter) be distributed as HTML.  A normal browser could read it
> then.  The only thing that really needs to be thought about is
> how the compression/decompression of the HTML is going to work to
> save space.  The browser will probably have to be modified to
> accept a type something like:
> 
> Content-type: octet-stream/html-zip
> 
> Or something like that.  Then UNZIP is called transparently and
> the page is viewed.
> 
> What does everyone else think? 

Hmmm. Well, the problem with HTML is that an html "document" really lives
in several files, due to all the graphics and stuff. Apart from that, it's
a fine markup language; we will need a standard covering the exact means of
compressing an entire HTML document into a .zip - the name of the 
root html file in the .zip should be index.htm, filenames should be 8.3
for legacy reasons (people won't be seeing the filenames used in the .zip anyway,
so pretty LFNs aren't really necessary).

One problem is that HTML graphics must currently be in raster format (.GIF, .JPG,
.PNG, etc). A vector graphics format would be a MAJOR boon. If an OpenDOS system
web browser could support a nice vector format (CGM? WMF? Homegrown), the
documentation could use that, and a standard utility could render a vector
graphic into a .PNG to make a "portable" but also "larger" HTML file.

ABW
--
Alaric B. Williams (alaric AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk)

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