Re: HTML Streaming

On Tue, 2 Sep 1997, Jordan Reiter wrote:

> >   When data is moving fast from one chunk of hardware to another, and
> >   it doesn't have to wait until it's all in one place for the
> >   destination device to do something with it, it's streaming. 
[...]
> Streamable files have to be in a special, particular format, and SGML
> languages just can't fit into that format.  So, no streaming, period.

HTML documents sent using HTTP works nicely now. The receiving host doesn't
need to block until the HTTP transaction is done.

If "streaming" also includes the real-time rendering of data, the current
scheme does that too (except tables, which HTML 4.0 addresses); look at the
Big 2 browsers.

Here's another proof that SGML data can be streamed:

elmert:/home/steve$ nsgmls -s
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<P>Test
nsgmls:<OSFD>0:2:2:E: document type does not allow element "P" here

Note that I was typing at the terminal, and nsgmls immediately rejected
"<P>Test" after I pressed enter. It didn't need to read in the whole
document first, hence streaming.

-- 
Steve Cheng     elmert@ipoline.com     <http://home.ipoline.com/~elmert/>

Received on Tuesday, 2 September 1997 17:59:08 UTC