RE: coupla html+ possibilities

Marc Andreessen ([email protected])
Wed, 7 Jul 93 04:27:24 -0500


Chris Davis writes:
> In Message-Id: <[email protected]>
> Marc Andreessen writes:
> >
> > (b) An optional parameter for <LI> to allow specification of a pointer
> > to an image to inline (rather than using a bullet or whatever).
> > This would let one do something like:
> >
> > <UL>
> > <LI IMG="internal-gopher-menu"> A Gopher menu.
> > <LI IMG="internal-gopher-image"> A weathermap.
> > </UL>
> >
> > ... and then one would get a slick bitmap-enumerated list. Again,
> > text-based clients could substitute the normal list style or
> > textual equivalents (e.g., "[menu]" and "[image]").
>
> When a link points to a gopher file, isn't the information about
> what type of data being pointed to already provided in the URL?
>
> e.g. gopher://ecn.purdue.edu/I9/Some_nifty_graphic
> Is known to be a "gopher-image" because of the I9.

Yup.

> I would think it wouldn't be too hard for the client to display a
> small bitmap instead of a bullet when it sees something like this in
> the link.

Because the Gopher communications module simply produces a HTML stream
(either tokenized or raw) that looks like:

<ul>
<li> <a href="gopher://blahblah/blah">An entry.</a>
<li> <a href="gopher://blahblah/blah">An entry.</a>
<li> <a href="gopher://blahblah/blah">An entry.</a>
</ul>

...or something similar. Yes, this could all be hacked so the Gopher
stuff is handled extra-special-different, but it would be much cleaner
to simply support the concept of arbitrary icons as bullets in
unnumbered lists. I think.

> As soon as you move out of gopher provided information, the problem
> becomes very murky, and an optional parameter like the one you
> suggest would probably be just about the only way to do it without a
> lot of headaches.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
[email protected]