Kenneth Whistler wrote in response to William Overington,
> > ...or to pick an extension, more or less at random, say ".html" > > > The file story7.uof could thus be used with a file named story.txt so as to > > indicate which objects were intended to be used for three uses of U+FFFC in > > the file story7.txt, in the order in which they are to be used. > > Or we could go even further, and specify that in the story7.html file, > the three uses of those objects could be introduced with a very specific > syntax that would not only indicate the order that they occur in, but > could indicate the *exact* location one could obtain the objects -- either on > one's own machine or even anywhere around the world via the Internet! And we could > even include a mechanism for specifying the exact size that the object should be > displayed. For example, we could use something like: > > <img src="http://www.coteindustries.com/dogs/images/dogs4.jpg"; width="380" > height="260" border="1"> > > And maybe someone will write cheaper software -- we could call it a "browser" -- > that could even be distributed for free, so that people could make use of > this convention for viewing objects correctly distributed with respect to > the text they are embedded in. > > Yes, yes, I think this is an idea which could fly. > Well, there might be some serious objections to such a proposal. One, the use of *.html clearly violates the standard file naming convention of eight uppercase ASCII letters followed by a period followed by a *three* letter uppercase ASCII file name extension. Secondly, the use of the greater-than and less-than ASCII characters to denote the mark-up sure appears to be a misuse of those characters. This may well cause too much confusion in parsing. 3<superscript>rd</superscript>, the cost of development of these hypothetical "browsers" would be quite high, and we couldn't really expect any such expensive software to be literally given away. There would have to be some catch to it all, wouldn't there? Best regards, James Kass, (P.S. - The point of this response is that maybe we shouldn't hastily reject new concepts just because they seem to fly in the face of existing practices. - JK)
![http://www.coteindustries.com/dogs/images/dogs4.jpg"](http://www.coteindustries.com/dogs/images/dogs4.jpg"){kind=link}