Re: CSS: Extended tiling. Proposal

Toby A Inkster writes:
> On Wed, 2004-05-05 at 17:28, Bert Bos wrote:
> > Your idea of putting the four numbers in a metadata file and linking
> > to that would work as well, except that such a file format isn't
> > readily available and it requires a second download: first the
> > metadata and then the image. 
> 
> 'data:' URLs could encouraged for linking to the metadata file.
> 
> The CSS3 spec could strongly encourage implementations to also implement
> 'data:' URLs as these could also be useful for embedding small bullet
> points, etc directly into the CSS.

"data:" URLs are cool... for small files that you only use in one
place and don't expect to edit often, or, in rare cases, for creating
compound documents when you can only create one file at a time, such
as documents generated by a CGI script. Although in the latter case,
it seems there is a technology missing: maybe browsers should support
some format that is in fact a ZIP or TAR of a compound document...

Yes, there are too few browsers that support "data:" URLs. But as a
solution for Andrew Fedoniouk's image-plus-four-numbers data format,
they seem a bit involved:

   1. invent a syntax for a file that contains a URL reference and
      four numbers
   2. give the format a name and register a MIME type for it

then, on actual use:

   3. create such a file and URL-encode it
   4. prefix "data:images/sliced," (or whatever the MIME type) to the
      resulting string
   5. put the result inside url() and put that in a style sheet

The result will be something like

   background: url(data:image/sliced,http%3A%2F%2Fexample.org%2Fimage.png%0A12%0A20%0A12%0A20)

which looks rather uglier than the tile() notation I mentioned or the
solution with four properties, while it does exactly the same thing.



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos/                              W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Thursday, 6 May 2004 11:08:55 UTC