wherefore CGM?

Walter Ian Kayes's use of bitmaps to represent characters reminded me
of something: Computer Graphics Metafile.

Does anyone remember when CGM was the big thing in computer graphics
standards?

ANSI/ISO 8632.1-4:1992

In actual use by the US Government! National Institute of Standards and
Technology's (NIST) even has a validation service for CGM, so's to
(briefly) provide "a way of determining the degree to which an
implementation conforms to the CGM standard (Federal Information
Processing Standard 128-2, Computer Graphics Metafile, and the
Continuous Acquisition and Life-Cycle Support Application Profile,
MIL-D-28003A or the Air Transport Association Specification 2100,
GREXCHANGE."

Is this a standard or what?

Ok, so it's flawed. But it's there. Many a web graphic could be a
fraction of the size of a GIF bitmap, and be resizable as well.

So why isn't it supported by graphical browsers?

David Perrell

Received on Wednesday, 4 December 1996 17:07:53 UTC