William Overington teased us all unmercifully with:
> It occurs to me that it is possible to introduce a convention, either as a
> matter included in the Unicode specification, or as just a known about
> thing, that if one has a plain text Unicode file with a file name that has
> some particular extension (any ideas for something like .uof for Unicode
> object file)
...or to pick an extension, more or less at random, say ".html"
> that accompanies another plain text Unicode file which has a
> file name extension such as .txt, or indeed other choices except .uof (or
> whatever is chosen after discussion) then the convention could be that the
> .uof file has on lines of text, in order, the name of the text file then the
> names of the files which contains each object to which a U+FFFC character
> provides the anchor.
>
> For example, a file with a name such as story7.uof might have the following
> lines of text as its contents.
>
> story7.txt
> horse.gif
> dog.gif
> painting.jpg
This is a shaggy dog story, right?
>
> The file story7.uof could thus be used with a file named story.txt so as to
> indicate which objects were intended to be used for three uses of U+FFFC in
> the file story7.txt, in the order in which they are to be used.
Or we could go even further, and specify that in the story7.html file,
the three uses of those objects could be introduced with a very specific
syntax that would not only indicate the order that they occur in, but
could indicate the *exact* location one could obtain the objects -- either on
one's own machine or even anywhere around the world via the Internet! And we could
even include a mechanism for specifying the exact size that the object should be
displayed. For example, we could use something like:
<img src="http://www.coteindustries.com/dogs/images/dogs4.jpg" width="380"
height="260" border="1">
or
<img src="http://www.artofeurope.com/velasquez/vel2.jpg">
> I can imagine that such a widely used practice might be helpful in bridging
> the gap between being able to use a plain text file or maybe having to use
> some expensive wordprocessing package.
And maybe someone will write cheaper software -- we could call it a "browser" --
that could even be distributed for free, so that people could make use of
this convention for viewing objects correctly distributed with respect to
the text they are embedded in.
Yes, yes, I think this is an idea which could fly.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Aug 14 2002 - 14:33:46 EDT
