NetScape standards, 2.0 features, and purple pages

[Holger Hoffstaette]

Wolfgang wrote:
> > Netsurfer already does inline video. :-) However, that still doesn't
> > solve
> 
> But only MPEG, or have I missed something?

Only QuickTime in various codecs and MPEG not at all. NEXTIME 3.3
doesn't have an MPEG decoder, AFAIK.

The current Netsurfer incarnation plays everything that NEXTIME
supports, which is not much of a miracle, since it -is- NEXTIME -
just not as separate application. Nice for demos when you have the
movie data sitting on a disk or at least mounted via NFS; absolutely
unusable via modem, since the presentation would become a -little-
boring if you tell the audience to come back in an hour or two,
just to see a few seconds of stamp-sized video wiggle by.

> > the problem of getting the movie data as a second, isochronous data
> > stream, independent from the control protocol, like it's been done with
> > ISDN. Could have been a breeze with real SGML..
> 
> There are several proposols for this, realaudio (only audio) and xing
> (audio and video) come to my mind (MBONE and CU-SEEME are also in this
> area). I think this is not so much s SGML problem but more a problem for
> the transfer protocol for isochronous data stream over unreliable data
> channels like the TCP/IP Internet.

<soapbox>

Yes and no - this is really two-fold.
Of course braind-dead TCP/IP isn't very useful on either really-
high-speed or low-bandwith networks, reliable or not. See the
ATM standards commitees and vendors bending over backwards in
order to achieve high throughput over these nice 155/622 mbit/sec
links..

Of c(o)urse, the real problem is not so much the transmission itself,
but rather client presentation. Since HTML combines the worst
features of both worlds (it's neither a full-featured presentation/
layout language, nor a sufficiently powerful language for structural
description), it's not possible to cleanly separate between
multiple data streams without resorting to 'features' like
client-pull/server-push. Of course, we could add a few attributes
here and there (for navigational purposes, or synchronisation, or..)
or (even better!) invent yet another mechanism.

Anyway, this is all pretty academic, because NetScape don't give
a flying [bad four-letter word here] - and amazingly enough,
everybody seems to like getting their multimedial future shaped
by a company that has about as much strategy like a dead fish on
the beach.

</soapbox>

(Now back to OmniWeb. Thanks for listening. Drive through.)

	Holger
---
  ___ 
 /\__\  Holger Hoffstaette              @work: hhoff at cube.de
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