Re: HTML Streaming

sugalsd@lbcc.cc.or.us (Dan Sugalski) wrote:

 >You should be, though. The original point of your proposal, as I understood

I do consider compression. Just not for descriptions I know will be replaced.

 >it, was to create some mechanism such that a rough sketch of the page could
 >be displayed, with the details filled in as the page was recieved. If

This is only one of the applications of events.

 >of PRE text are defined* PRE text is preformatted, and is supposed to be
 >displayed in a fixed width font, with basically *no* messing about by the
 >browser.

I know what preformatted text is. You totally missed my point which I made 
on the next line. 

 >Panose numbers aren't going to do you a bit of good *without the text that
 >generated the number*! Giving the bounding box for a word under a
 >particular font, even with panose numbers to describe that font, doesn't
 >give enough info to generate a bounding box for a font with different
 >properties.

If you use a base font you can make some assumptions. It does not matter, I 
am no longer using panose number in my global description.

 >I think you're wildly misjudging the direction that web design is going. An
 >increasingly large fraction of pages are being generated automatically,
 >either on the fly or in batches, from databases and other non-UI systems.
 >The site I run, as an example, has about 2800 pages, of which maybe 10% are
 >*not* generated by a program.

The invisible web is very hard to estimate. I have heard everything from 
ten to fifty percent. Anyway, it would not be impossible for a non-UI system 
to use events.

 >Sure, printing is a subset of displaying, one that's simpler in many ways.
 >The issue I was trying to raise with you is that, because the end display
 >medium is *so* varied, you can't make *any* assumptions about it when
 >generating your page descriptions.

You can make assumptions about img and tables. You can also list the events
in page. I am beginning to understand your confusion. These advantages are
subtle and difficult to grasp similar to the advantages of Document Object 
Models or Style Sheets.

 >You found pages where the time to fire up a reasonably sized plug-in was
 >*less* than the time it took to start displaying the page? I think if

No. I compared the time it takes a plugin or compiler to load against the 
time it takes the browser to know that the page contains compilers or plugins
code i.e the place in the document they are normally placed.

>you'll check, you'll see that the page in question was using IMG elements
>without size attributes, or possibly tables.

The pages were my own and did not contain tables or images.

Albert Fine

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 1997 13:53:44 UTC