Re: REQUEST FOR COMMENT: .htmld format

Rohit Khare (khare)
Mon, 6 Feb 1995 18:51:43 -0800


I am forwarding bbums comments to the list. I, too, would like to move the
WebStep community past GIF, but that's not a practical vision for the Web as a
whole. Also, I doubt jpeg is the right answer for imaged text (even in lossless
mode).

Rohit

PS. A reminder: post submissions to WebStep@mail.xent.caltech.edu. You need the
"mail" part.

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Mon, 06 Feb 1995 20:37:00 -0600
From: Bill Bumgarner <bbum@friday.com>
Subject: Re: REQUEST FOR COMMENT: .htmld format
To: khare@CALTECH.EDU
Cc: WebStep@xent.caltech.edu
Reply-to: bbum@friday.com
Message-id: <199502070237.UAA00925@friday.com>
X-Envelope-to: khare@cco.caltech.edu
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X-A: I ride tandem with the random...
X-B: ...things don't run the way I plan them.

Wow! Cool RFC -- looks like things are moving in the right direction. I had
one comment:

# * GIF or XBM inlined images

Considering that GIF has been killed by patent abuse (BTW: It was NOT
Compu$erve's fault -- they are such an easy target for an abuse, but don't
deserve it in this case -- it was Unisys (i think -- some UniXXX company,
anyway), should the Spec really call for GIF as the only alternative to XBM?

How about JPEG? Netscape, et al. deal well with that. OmniWeb does an okay
job w/OmniImageFilter (or similar) installed -- though it does die on large
images (OIF seems awfully slow in comparison to the independent jpeg group's
command-line utility "djpeg", but OIF uses the JPEG group's library -- must
have something to do w/mach-messaging).

Too bad fractal/wavelet compression is not more popular; wavelet allows for
automatic resolution improvement if one is willing to wait for an image to
transfer; fractal allows for that + the ability to decompress to an arbitrary
resolution.

[btw: i found some fractal de/compression resources at:

http://inls.ucsd.edu/y/Fractals/
]

b.bum