Re: Is time running out for the without STYLE SHEET guidelines?

> Lynx allows plugins and has done for years - you can attach image 

Almost from the beginning it has done this using the mailcap facility.
I know that there are other options, but they are only really known
to a few power users (most users will never touch mailcap, let alone
the newer options).

Mailcap is actually very much in line with the original concept of
HTML, which was to provide the navigational glue to get to other
resources.  Although I'm sure the Mosaic team didn't think of it
that way, I'd say that one ought to treat img elements as a special
case of <a>, from that point of view, and that's what Lynx will
do with the right options (real world web pages have such a large
proportion of noise images, that image links is not normally a
good option to turn on).

The Mosaic view of img is much more of compound multimedia document
with simultaneous presentation of all components.

> viewers, audio players, W3C's tablin table linearisation tool, or 
> whatever you can think of if you want to.

However, when people talk about plugins, what they really mean is the
ability to use it with a plugin written for Windows IE, and possibly
involving ActiveX scripting.

Many formats of interest are proprietory, so, unless you can write
a wrapper around the IE or Netscape function, or they provide
a command line one, you are out of luck.

The reason that Jon was not aware of existing capablities is probably
the Unix syndrome.  You need to read the documentation and understand
what you are doing.  IE will often ask to download a plugin (and
many users will do so without evaluating the security implications),
partly because the object element is written specifically to either
load a specific IE plugin, or to go to a dynamic web site that checks
the User Agent and supplies an appropriate one.  Someone going to
such a site from Lynx is unlikely to be told where to find the amateur
written interface or replacement - but many power users lie about their
User Agent, anyway (I don't).

Received on Friday, 31 January 2003 14:26:24 UTC