Re: Resizing images relative to window size

Melt van Schoor wrote:
> 
> >No, I meant that you'd have an external application work on it to a
> >temporary file or area of memory, and then the browser would pick the
> >result up and display it in its own window.
> >
> >James
> 
> Sorry for me-tooing, but this is a great idea. I can imagine that different
> people would attempt to create graphics utilities especially for this
> purpose, and in the end, it would lead to a vast improvement in speed & quality.
> 
> This approach could also enable the web to contain more than 3 graphics
> formats for www pages, if the utility would simply convert it to .GIF (or
> .PNG) before passing the results to the browser.  Mabey we would even be
> able to use vector-based graphics on www-pages, and there are many
> advantages to this.

This idea reduces the size of the browser by a long way.  My web browser
has always relied on external tools to convert incoming images into the
native sprite format.  As a result, support for new graphic formats is
trivial, plus I can use virtually any native file format for inlined
images.  In effect, I suppose this is similar to the effect that plugins
give you with Netscape.  If a document arrives which isn't text/html or
text/plain, then a message is broadcast to all tasks requesting that the
object be rendered.  

I have an option in my web browser to choose which tool is asked to
translate GIF images.  One of them will do Floyd-Steinberg dithering and
is slow because of that, the other does not dithering and is therefore a
lot faster although the quality is lower.

The dithering and other sophisticated graphical transformations are
then under control of a tool other than the browser.

The only bad experience I have had with this is that it takes longer to import
the images this way, and progressive image display is much harder, and
thus animated inlines are very hard.

-- 
Stewart Brodie, Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~snb94r/      http://delenn.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

Received on Friday, 5 July 1996 08:59:34 UTC