Re: HTTP: T-T-T-Talking about MIME Generation
Brian Behlendorf (brian@wired.com)
Fri, 16 Dec 1994 13:35:08 -0800 (PST)
On Fri, 16 Dec 1994, Marc Salomon wrote:
> Do browsers have to know the size of the image before you create a spot for it
> on the page at render time? Couldn't you render the HTML as soon as it
> arrives enabling anchors and leaving a standard sized hole, like the [S] icon
> that xmosaic uses, and resize the hole as the image data arrive? It'd be a
> bit jumpy...unacceptably so?
Too jumpy, yes. Look at MacWeb and MacMosaic - both leave a small icon
for the image, redrawing the screen when it starts rendering the image.
If I am reading something below that, I completely lose my place when it
gets resized.
> Given the scenario above, sounds like multipart/mixed gets an A in net.
> citizenship (points off for sending all those nasty ascii headers) and perhaps
> a A- in UPP (since the images do not all arrive simultaneously), although
> someone has sketched a scheme for multiplexing several images into a
> MIME stream earlier in the year on www-talk, I think, which would do just that.
But aren't you 75% of the way towards -NG when multiplexing MIME?
> Do any of you all out there with gig and gig of log files have any data on
> what percentage of requests for HTML docs come from Netscape?
For the last week, NetScape (any platform) accounted for 65% of hits to
our home page.
> >From the HTTP perspective, multipart/mixed for representing HTML, is probably
> a bridge solution to realize a limited performance gain until we can see
> widespread deployment of next-generation and binary protocols. But for the
> web as a worldwide information system, there are long-term benefits to
> extending the interchange of HTML and therefore the web beyond just HTTP, but
> to other MIME-compliant systems like NNTP and SMTP.
Definitely - I'd like to be able to send an HTML document + inlined
images as a multipart mail message or posted to a newsgroup. I can do
that now, it's just hardly anyone has a MIME news reader and there's no
100% reliable way to build an HREF (that I know of) from one part to
another. Likewise I'd like to see HTTP kept separate from HTML so that
its benefits extend to other media types too.
Brian
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