From: "Tim Bird" <tbird AT caldera DOT com>
Message-Id: <9703271733.ZM11540@caldera.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 17:33:38 -0700
In-Reply-To: "Alaric B. Williams" <alaric@abwillms.demon.co.uk>
        "Re: [opendos] Wishlist v2.0" (Mar 27,  7:28pm)
References: <199703230057 DOT BAA07350 AT magigimmix DOT xs4all DOT nl> 
	<859490764 DOT 0626642 DOT 0 AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
To: OpenDOS <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: [opendos] Wishlist v2.0
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Alaric B. Williams wrote:
> 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.

Hey! These are really good ideas.  Is anyone writing this down?
(besides the maillist archive software?)

Here's what I glean:
	- standardized archive format for multiple HTML pages to solve
	the "lots of small files" problem (.zip would work)
	- there should be some conventions about the files in the archive
		- 8.3 names for non-LFN systems
		- should contain INDEX.HTML as cover page for document set
		- document hyperlinks should be self-contained and use
		relative URLs to avoid hard-coding paths (except for URLS
		which actually refer to remote pages)
	- would be nice to have some meta-formats that could be exploded
	to formats acceptable to web browsers
		- convert from a vector format to raster (.PNG) format

Tim Bird