Re: HTTP: T-T-T-Talking about MIME Generation

On Fri, 16 Dec 1994, Marc Salomon wrote:
> Do browsers have to know the size of the image before you create a spot for it
> on the page at render time?  Couldn't you render the HTML as soon as it
> arrives enabling anchors and leaving a standard sized hole, like the [S] icon 
> that xmosaic uses, and resize the hole as the image data arrive?  It'd be a 
> bit jumpy...unacceptably so?

Too jumpy, yes.  Look at MacWeb and MacMosaic - both leave a small icon 
for the image, redrawing the screen when it starts rendering the image.  
If I am reading something below that, I completely lose my place when it 
gets resized.  

> Given the scenario above, sounds like multipart/mixed gets an A in net.
> citizenship (points off for sending all those nasty ascii headers) and perhaps 
> a A- in UPP (since the images do not all arrive simultaneously), although 
> someone has sketched a scheme for multiplexing several images into a 
> MIME stream earlier in the year on www-talk, I think, which would do just that.

But aren't you 75% of the way towards -NG when multiplexing MIME?

> Do any of you all out there with gig and gig of log files have any data on 
> what percentage of requests for HTML docs come from Netscape?

For the last week, NetScape (any platform) accounted for 65% of hits to 
our home page.

> >From the HTTP perspective, multipart/mixed for representing HTML, is probably
> a bridge solution to realize a limited performance gain until we can see 
> widespread deployment of next-generation and binary protocols.  But for the 
> web as a worldwide information system, there are long-term benefits to 
> extending the interchange of HTML and therefore the web beyond just HTTP, but 
> to other MIME-compliant systems like NNTP and SMTP.  

Definitely - I'd like to be able to send an HTML document + inlined 
images as a multipart mail message or posted to a newsgroup.  I can do 
that now, it's just hardly anyone has a MIME news reader and there's no 
100% reliable way to build an HREF (that I know of) from one part to 
another.  Likewise I'd like to see HTTP kept separate from HTML so that 
its benefits extend to other media types too.

	Brian

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Received on Friday, 16 December 1994 13:51:14 UTC