Re: Compiled HTML Docs...

Matt Foster (mwf@engr.engr.uark.edu)
Sat, 28 Jan 1995 02:45:29 +0100


On Fri, 27 Jan 1995, Lance Bledsoe wrote:

>
> Pardon me for butting in (I've only been on the list for a few days, now) but
> has anyone brocahed the idea of compiled html docs? I feel that at some point,
> HTML developers will want to have the source code for their pages compiled
> into a format which will make them somewhat less duplicatable by others. Also,
> a compiled doc should load a little quicker than a pure ascii version...
>
> Any thoughts?

Let's think about this. If you were to compile a file filled with
marked-up text, it wouldn't necessarly run (transport) faster. Thanks to
data compression and the sorts, text usually transports at twice the
speed of strict binary (at least over most lines of communication). Anyway,
if you wanted to compile your HTML files, what would there be to compile.
The majority of a HTML (or any marked-up text) file is data; not code.
There would, therefore, not be any REAL gain in having it compiled over
translated.
If you wanted to compile the code for security reasons, then that can
be handled another way. There are browsers (at least I think there are)
that allow you to encyrpt your HTML documents. Isn't that NetScape's
main feature that most browsers don't have???

Agree?

matt();
http://www.engr.uark.edu/~mwf/