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Subject:Re: It's all Gutenberg's fault... :-) From:David Blyth <dblyth -at- QUALCOMM -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 16 May 1996 17:43:27 -0700
Kent> Anyway, during one of the selected topics, Mr. Horton did indeed talk
Kent about how early manuscripts relied heavily on illustration (both
Kent> informative and decorative) until the invention of the printing press
Kent> reduced the cost of the text and increased the cost of illustration.
Arlen> Did Horton mean by the comparison that illustrations would soon be
composed
Arlen> the same way, by slapping together pre-drawn elements to compose a larger
Arlen> picture?
At a guess, yes. Netscape has already proposed the equivalent for Web
documents. In March they announced that they're building a Web server
which slices documents into pieces, then allows clients to request and
assemble pieces into a customized document. The Beta is due out in June
or so.
Netscape also takes the position that many of the "pre-drawn elements" are
already on the Internet. Thus, they've proposed a change to URL addresses
to allow the ldap open protocol and simple requests. This would allow you
to instantly collate elements into Web pages by querying the Internet.
For example, the URL
would return an HTML listing of all the people working in Foobar's sales
department in France.
Netscape is on the fringe - but they're by no means the only ones working
on this kind of proposal. If the typical pattern is followed, Microsoft
will copy the idea in three months using:
[The above line is called "a joke." Jokes are often used by humans to
reduce tension.]
David (The Unbiased) Blyth
Technical Writer
QUALCOMM
Standard disclaimer. QUALCOMM isn't that crazy.
Blodo Poa Maximus
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