Subject: Re: Graphic Images
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 20 2001 - 09:00:34 CDT
>Actually, back to these days where there was no Netscape and where UNISYS
>hadn't claimed LZW patent and GIF, every IMG SRC you could find where
>pointing GIF pictures. Then, some people rightfully decided that JPG was
>good for you and IMG SRC began to point to JPG. That broke NCSA xmosaic,
>but not for a long time. Then, the GIF lawsuit raised and PNG being
>actively
>developped to provide et free replacement for GIF, was more features,
>became
>mature and was used. But this was not perfect as IE that has more and more
>marketshare was still unable to handle them correctly... (neither was
>Netscape).
>
>Now, I yet have to find a IMG SRC that does not point to one of the three
>file format above.
Do not confuse the idea "does not in the common case" with "can not". It's a
very important and vital distinction. Netscape and IE also have at least the
ability to enable plugins, making them well-adapted for situations where
they were not particularly designed for (SWF, Java). To date, we share no
such luxury.
> > We have to break out of this second-class application mentality.
>
>This is NOT second-class mentality. Let's answer by some question.
>
>Why do we speak only English on this list ?
>Because this is the most common language denominator betweem us. Some speak
>it better than the other, but we are able to undersand each other.
See above. Also, it's a fact of life that I don't speak Russian or Chinese.
It would take me a significant time committment to learn to do so. Just
think of all the smart people in the world that can code who don't speak
English and who could contribute significantly to this project. I really
wish that I magically could (through some dynamically loadable backend to
myself) communicate with them. Oh, wait... Why do the legwork when someone
else has already done it for us?
>Why do we send text in these e-mails ?
>Because this is the most common denominator too that anyone can decode
See above.
>The image problem is the same. Just seing how much image format we
>can have in RTF gives me some headache. Even more when several of these
>formats are duplicate in term of features. By only supporting
>3 image format in the ABW file format, and those format being
>standard, you guarantee that anyone can decode ABW files without too
>much efforts. We are not closed to foreign format. We are just trying
>to not overcomplexify things.
This doesn't make the RTF (or any importer/exporter) problem necessarily go
away. We still need to parse incoming files correctly, otherwise we're
worthless to our users.
For exporting, let's hypothetically suggest that RTF only supports GIF
images and we only encode to PNG. Now, wouldn't it be easy to export to RTF
if it was flexible enough to also allow the includion of PNG into its
sources, via a method indistinguishable from its native GIF?
One man against the world,
Dom
and yes, this is still second-class citizen mentality. we're refusing to
better ourselves where it would be trivial to do so.
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