Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 12:11:46 -0400 From: Jim Davis <davis@dri.cornell.edu> Message-Id: <199210161611.AA06348@willow.tc.cornell.edu> To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch Subject: non-text documents Can you tell us when WWW and Viola will support non-text documents? I would very much like to be able to return pictures including Postscript. I know this has been discussed in the past. One issue is how will the client know what kind of data is being returned. It seems there are several possibilities: 1) Make the client figure it out itself by examining the data (e.g. for "magic numbers"). Simplest, but makes the client do too much work. 2) Use typed links. A server which wishes to return non-text data first returns a constructed document containing anchors where the link type somehow encodes the data type. Benefit here is that it allows the user to choose the kind of data if there is a choice. 3) the HTTP protocol to allow an HTTP server to inform the client of the kind of data to be returned, maybe even negotiate about it. 4) Extend HTML to allow embedded non-text data, perhaps by using MIME. Servers will probabaly construct a new document for each query, using MIME's external reference feature where possible to avoid copying large data files. best wishes