> The problem with HTML (IMHO, of course) is that it is text-only.
We
> really want HTML -> HMML -- you'd have an information system that
> could display pix and sketches of pot sherds, for example. Now if
> you're interested in exploring that possibility...
HMML is in fact already an extension of HTML for multimedia from
O'Reilly. There are similar extenstions from NCSA. We just have to
standardize on them for the next DTD which we define. HTML was
checkpointed so as not to make a moving target. NCSA's (released)
Mosaic for X handles embedded images in the hypertext, as does
O'Reilly's (unreleased) Viola.
The pictures don't seem to have been very complicated to add (just to
implement), it is just a question of agreeing on syntax.
In the WWW context, of couse, the tags refer to embedded images by
W3 address, and the retrieval code is responsible for negotiating a
suitable transfer representation for the pic independently of the
embedding document.
Tim Berners-Lee
WWW project, CERN