Part of the DaveNet Mail website. San Francisco CA USA. 12/2/96.

Let's Have Fun -- Now! RE: ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS

Sent:12/2/96; 3:25:06 PM
From: mcjones@pa.dec.com

Lots of interesting ideas in today's column.

Re Client-side Includes: Microsoft says it's incorporating something called "Dynamic HTML" into IE. The press release (www.microsoft.com/corpinfo/press/1996/Oct96/DYNHTMPR.htm) has little technical detail, but says it's based on a proposal they submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium. In any case, I wonder if Dynamic HTML will include the idea you suggest.

Re New plug-ins: Some colleagues of mine have prototyped an outliner for HTML, which they call "Zippers"; see

http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/abstracts/src-rr-140.html

Your idea of adding appropriate browser hooks to allow such a thing to be implemented by a plug-in is a good one. (They were forced to write a browser from scratch. Because of the powerful UI toolkit they were using, this wasn't as hard as it sounds, but it did mean they didn't end up with a full-featured browser.)

Re CD changers: I've been waiting for this too. I have approximately 1000 audio CD's, and all the 100-disk changers I've looked at only have enough memory for the online disks. So each time I rotated new disks into the player, I would have to reprogram the title and genre information through the clumsy front-panel interface Not! While you are wishing, how about hoping for a changer that supports reasonably-priced extension storage modules? If the disks were stacked closely together, with just thin shims separating them, a thousand disks wouldn't take up much space.

Re More Web Radio: I suspect the fidelity at 56kbps (e.g., ISDN or US Robotics "x2" POTS modem) with very good compression might approach FM radio. (It would be interesting to learn the raw data rate of the Sony "minidisc" player that came out a few years ago.) But I think today there would be other problems: lack of bandwidth in the internet, lack of standardized multicast protocols, and a shortage of phone lines as people found web radio meant they were staying online even longer. I suspect this will have to wait until cable modems or xDSL arrives and the internet backbone bandwidth increases.

Let's Have Fun -- Now!

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