On Wed, Jan 05, 2011 at 01:41:32PM -0600, Pottinger, Hardy J. wrote: > > I guess I don't understand the problem. I thought we called that a > > web browser. It either says, "oh, I know how to show that" and does > > it, or "ah, you use Adobe Reader/OpenOffice/VLC/JMol/whatever for those, > > I'll fire it up." > > Hi, Mark, that approach works great for born-digital materials, and for > anything that will load in a browser within a reasonable span of time. As the > size of the object you are storing grows, you reach a point where downloading > the entire object before you can use it becomes a problem. Additionally, if > the content you are storing has previously been presented in way that > provides instant access--say, in this case, a page turner in a digital > library--users would have certain expectations of any future presentation of > that material. They don't really care all that much about how the material is > stored, but they care a great deal if the content isn't available with the > same, or similar, level of usability.
OK, that's a problem.
But that all sounds like PDF so far. PDFs need to be linearized to
support random page access, but that's easy and can be done with free
tools.
> In addition to page turning, we're also interested in adding large-scale
> image viewing capabilities to DSpace. Something more akin to Google Maps (and
> many of the images we're wanting to store and display are in fact maps).
> Without a pan and zoom interface of some sort, it can be difficult to
> ascertain whether the image you're downloading is in fact the image you want
> to download.
>
> I think most of this still falls squarely in the realm of theme development,
> in DSpace terms. But it would be great to trade approaches with other DSpace
> users. I have the feeling a fair number of us are storing (or planning to do
> so) more "digital library" kinds of materials in our repositories. If there
> were a standardized way to enable, or facilitate, external viewing software,
> that would be a benefit to us all.
Also a problem. Thanks for explaining.
While we need *something* soon, I think that the proper scope for such
standardization is wider than just DSpace. The real problem, it seems
to me, is that neither HTML nor CSS defines an 'unscaled' attribute.
Would the DSpace community want to get together to promote a standard
way to indicate that an image should not be shrunk to fit the browser
window?
I suppose you can play games with the 'height' and 'width' attributes,
but that means either hand-coding them or having your service
(e.g. DSpace) delve into the image on the fly to discover the
necessary values. I don't believe the browser is required to obey
them. And if it does, that just makes the whole page bigger, but what
we would want (I think) is just to move a viewport around the image
without moving other controls offscreen in the process.
I feel that this stuff belongs in the browser. To do it in the
service feels like mission creep, and means that the work has to be
duplicated across all services that want to deliver large-scale images
or paginated documents.
--
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer mw...@iupui.edu
Balance your desire for bells and whistles with the reality that only a
little more than 2 percent of world population has broadband.
-- Ledford and Tyler, _Google Analytics 2.0_
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