If all goes as planned, X Mosaic will be expanded in the
not-too-distant future to be able to handle heterogeneous MIME
documents. This capability will probably take the form of a MIME
"master widget" that will create child widgets to display various data
elements -- text, GIF images, JPEG images, MPEG movies, and so on.
The child widgets will in turn be able to have active elements of
their own... a widget represent audio/basic will have a 'play'
button, a readout giving the duration of the audio clip, and so on.
Widgets representing unknown types will have controls to allow saving
the data to a local file or possibly passing it to an external
program.
So, we're going to need widgets to display as many different common
datatypes as possible -- for example, we plan to use Dan Connolly's
RTF widget for RTF data elements -- and we'd like to solicit pointers
to or donations of widgets that can display common data formats. (Of
course, we're distributing full source for X Mosaic and its respective
parts every step of the way.)
The more widgets we don't have to write ourselves, the faster we can
get multimedia X Mosaic out the door and the more capabilities it can
have... so pointers or donations will be most appreciated.
Marc