> >Uli: And we can't display a HyperCard stack in a web
> >browser (the way HTML does it).
>
>Alain: I was imagining the (eventual) process as
>similar to embedding Quicktime or Java-Applets into
>web pages, with the EMBED and/or OBJECT tags. Even
>better though would be a browser REPLACEMENT (e.g
>Web-savvy FreeCard stacks).
Alain,
the trouble is, plug-ins are like images. They just get a rectangle
in the window, and there they are allowed to draw and they're
notified of clicks and the user typing keys. Anything that's drawn in
there is drawn using OS-specific calls, not using XML or anything.
Thus, the browser is actually only providing the window to draw in,
anything else is just like with any other application.
Thus, XML would have absolutely no advantage in this regard.
>Alain: In D-HTML, with or without CSS, layers can be
>sized and positioned with pixel-precision.
Still, we'd need pages of HTML code to describe what would fit into
16 bytes of binary data.
>Alain: True, but with a lot of presentation-type stuff
>added to the mix since the advent of the Internet and,
>in particular, since the Internet became the
>mass-public phenomenon that we know of today. CSS is
>supposed to be the answer to that, separating
>content-structure from content-presentation, as HTML
>was supposed to be in the first place.
If needed, we could add an exporter to DHTML, but that would miss
lots of features and we'd have to translate FreeScript to Java or
HTML links and "do" would become impossible etc. It'd be pretty
disadvantageous. I think it'd be smarter if we just had an "open URL"
command like the QuickTime Player has it. For 2.0 or so.
To make our file format streamable, we'd need a special web
file-format that breaks a stack into several files, where parts of
the file are downloaded separately, probably split into separate
files (one file per card or so), as I'm not sure we can say "download
byte 1 to 7 of file x" over the web. We'd just have the client write
that into a stack and add some special marker to the file with the
URL to get additional cards. It's all possible and within what we
allowed for so far, just not at the top of the list for now.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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