Re: wmf-svg

At 09:07 AM 2000-10-31 +0000, jonathan chetwynd wrote: 
>
> has anyone used a wmf viewer within linux?
> (possibly libwmf)
>  
> excuse me advertising my ignorance again.. after many months, I've finally
> been forced to look at the w3c/svg pages.
>  
> I discovered that the 4 largest and most popular LD graphics suppliers all
> use .wmf as their format.
> Due to copyright issues they are extremely unlikely to allow extensive
use of
> their resources on the web.
> as you know it would be possible to create HTML links to the users hard
> drive, and this has an additional benefit of speed.
>  
> As not everyone has all 4 is their any plan to allow alternative linking in
> HTML, ie if the img is not available?


The OBJECT element in HTML 4 is designed to do what you want, here.  It allows
you to define a sequence of fallback options.  Unfortunately, it is
implemented
in partial and inconsistent ways in various browsers, so it is not a reliable
coding feature unless you control the browser your clients use and test what
you do with that browser.

If you compose your presentations in SMIL there is the SWITCH construct to
manage such content alternatives.

The OBJECT element in HTML is a known trouble spot that is on the wish list
for
the HTML Working Group to re-engineer in the development of XHTML 2.0.  It may
or may not come out looking more like the SWITCH in SMIL.

Given what you want to do, I am wondering if you should be planning for your
users to be running a small server locally on their own computer and handle
the
library options at this personal server.  You don't necessarily want to be
resolving these alternatives on the fly each time you come to a reference to a
graphic object.  What you could do instead is have a configuration script that
you run which detects what libraries are available on this installation, and
adjusts the server configuration to use them.

Al

>
> even if my perl allowed it, universality precludes me from providing 4 pages
> for every case, and users would be aware that the benefits derive from
> defaulting/tiering libraries. 
>  
> would an svg viewer render wmf images?
> are they sufficiently different that as in photography, a conversion of
> format would be sufficient to allow recognition without legal recourse?
>  
> thanks
>  
> jonathan chetwynd
>  
> <mailto:jc@signbrowser.org.uk>jc@signbrowser.org.uk
> IT teacher (learning difficulty)
> & accessibility consultant

Received on Tuesday, 31 October 2000 10:26:23 UTC