Re: HTML Documents

Scott Raney ((no email))
Tue, 19 Apr 94 20:34:48 MDT

>
> Has anyone considered creating a WYSIWIG HTML editor with MetaCard? The
> only problem I can see with creating a viewer like NCSA Mosaic would be the
> embedded graphics in a scrollable text field. If this issue could be
> addressed, I think an editor would be feasible. But then again, I'm pretty
> new to the HTML format.
> Any ideas?

Though it's theoretically possible to do this now, I don't think that
such a project will be practical until the MetaCard engine has support
for import/export of HTML data, and the field gets support for
embedding bitmaps in text. There are just too many potential layout
difficulties and performance problems without these.

HTML support is already on the feature request list since it came out
5th in the features section of the MetaCard survey (though more people
actually wanted RTF than HTML), and it probably will be in the next
major release. It *won't* be in 1.4, however, since we're trying to
keep the new features list for that to a minimum so that we can get it
out relatively soon.

It's amazing how critical mass works, though. Last year my bet would
have been that MIME would become the formatted text standard for Unix
systems. But MIME usage has been building only very slowly, and HTML
has blown it out of the water for most practical purposes. All the
"respectable" SGML systems (e.g., HyTime) are dead in the water too.
If only we had seen this one coming...
Scott

-- 
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* Scott Raney  303-447-3936            Remember: the better you look, *
* raney@metacard.com                   the more you'll see -- Lidia   *
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