I realize that this is another unplanned change that I'm making
without getting a consensus or having it added to the spec or
whatever. I also realize that, as with the IMG tag, it may be used
fairly widely in documents on the net even though it's not part of the
HTML spec, possibly making those documents not as friendly to other
browsers (although I hear the next Midas will support this, and
really, it's not that complex to add to an existing image-capable
browser).
There are three reasons I'm going ahead and adding support for it to
Mosaic anyway: (a) as it happens, I need to support this capability
internally for certain things in any case, (b) this adds a lot of
power and flexibility to browser interaction without too much overhead
or complexity on either client or server side, and (c) there is simply
no other way to get the same effect, due to a lack of an appropriate
CGM-style hypermedia graphics description language for use in the Web
that would support things like overview diagrams of document sets and
geographical maps with documents tied to different regions, and we
need this functionality in general.
So I hope I don't make anyone too unhappy; if anyone has thoughts or
comments, I'd like to hear 'em...
Marc