Re: hmmm... servers producing per-browser customised output.

Alastair Aitken CLMS (ZPALASTAIR@CLUSTER.NORTH-LONDON.AC.UK)
Thu, 3 Nov 94 9:57 BST


Jeff Smith wrote:
> |>anthony baxter wrote:
> |>>[...]
> |>> I'm dreading the day where pages are just one large imagemap gif of the
> |>> page, exactly as the provider wants it to look.
> |>>
> |> I have been involved with a group who were contemplating setting
> |> up a WWW-based newspaper. One of their major concerns was how to
> |> get a satisfactory layout. In particular, many of the members
> |> wanted to be able to preserve the columnar style of classical
> |> newspapers. I'd expect the <Table> tag to be good for this, but
> |> till that's widely supported, one approach that I demonstrated
> |> to the group was exactly that: pages done as gifs! And they liked
> |> it..
> |> _______________________Alan_Richmond__________________________
> |> CyberWeb http://www.charm.net/~web/CWSW.html World
> |> SoftWare http://www.charm.net/~web/Vlib.html Wide
> |> WWW Systems Engineering web@sowebo.charm.net Web

>Yes, but you can't do searches on the text and can't view them on
>non-graphic terminals.

I did this too, gave a presentation and the audience liked it. I also
compared HTML with a preformatted gif of some text and imagery. I have
seen some pretty complicated gifs on welcome pages too (I have seen
Microsoft's server. It seems to me that it would be possible, but messy,
to effect a kludge whereby the text in the gif was duplicated in a piece of
plain text and indexed. A successful hit on the index would, prior to
building an html menu of hits for a user, would convert the hit.html to
hit.gif. This would appear to render gifs searchable, messy, time
consuming but potentially very pretty.

Alastair.