HTML -> >- Printed Copy

[Brian Kelly]

> >>         BOSTON, Feb. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
> >>    today announced that its TrueType(R) font technology has been extended
> >>    to the World Wide Web, allowing designers to create great-looking Web
> >>    pages that consumers can view -- even if they haven't bought the
> >>    specific typefaces for their PCs.  Forty industry leaders -- including
> 
> >Notice this says "for their PCs".  The Web was developed to provide
> >a platform-independent information system.  Should libraries
> >be throwing away this patform independence by getting into bed
> >with Mr Gates?!
> 
> Ooh, let's all bash Microsoft.  C'mon--vent, people!

Oops, I didn't want to start a flame war.  I'm not one of those
Linux or Mac types - I've got a nice 16 Mb pentium with 
WInodws 95 and am running the Windows 95 Office suite.

> Now let's read ALL of the first paragraph from this press 
> release: "The TrueType-for-the-Web solution will 
> include...a royalty-free cross-platform licensing program 
> for Microsoft's high-performance TrueType rasterizer, which 
> allows all platforms to support TrueType technology."

OK, sorry, I skimmed through the press release.  "royalty-free"  
and "across all platforms" sound to be just want we require.

BUT the numbers of display technologies seems to be growing:
HTML 2, HTML 3 (proposed), Netscape HTMLisms, Microsoft HTMLisms,
Acrobat, richer SGML DTDs, Postscript, Envoy, ... and now Microsoft
new technology.

How do we cope?  Should we be installing viewers for all these 
document formats on our systems (and leave it to the information 
provider to use their prefered solution)?  Should the information 
provider make the information available in a variety of formats?

If the latter, how does the user choose their preferred option?  
How do we prevent unnecessary use of network bandwidth by the
naive end user selecting document types for which there is no viewer
on their client machine?

The answer should be by the use of content negotiation (see 
Brian Behlendorf's excellent introduction at the URL
http://www.organic.org/Staff/brian/cn/)
However I understand that this is only implemented in the 
Apache and W3O (formerly CERN) server.  Is this true?
Should we be lobbying the server and client developers
to support content negotiation?

Comments?

> Thomas Dowling
> (Strongly suspecting that the future of the net involves getting
> into bed with either Mr. Gates or Mr. Andreesen, and neither one
> has even bought me dinner yet.)

Brian Kelly
(Strongly suspecting that Thomas could be right and worried 
about it but thinking that we should get into bed with Tim 
Berners-Lee and the standards crowd, perhaps because I had 
a drink with them at the first WWW conference).
--------------------------------------------------
Brian Kelly
Netskills         - see http://www.netskills.ac.uk/
Computing Service
University of Newcastle
Newcastle-upon-Tyne        B.Kelly at newcastle.ac.uk
NE1 7RU                    0191 222 5002