Re: Mosaic - all caps or mixed case?

Subject: Re: Mosaic - all caps or mixed case?
From: Laura Lemay <lemay -at- DEATH -dot- KALEIDA -dot- COM>
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 1994 13:28:46 +0800

>Does anyone know if Mosaic is upper-case or mixed-case letters? I
>didn't think it was an acronym, and I'd prefer to not add another
>all-caps word to our vocabulary. Any guesses? Thanks.


Mosaic is not an acronym. Its mixed case in just the
way both of us have written it here.

And about the WWW question:

I've been looking into WWW (World Wide Web) and its various browsers,
just for fun, and come up with the following thoughts:


- Distributing documents over the net makes updates trivial; update the
file, and its done. The next time your customer views the document,
the get the update.

- Distributing documents over the net, however, also means that you have
no control over someone copying your docs, modifying them, and distributing
them elsewhere.

- WWW documents can be viewed cross-platform -- Mac, Windows, X, at least.
There are also text-only versions for people without direct net connections,
and rumored ports of browsers to the Amiga and NeXT.

- Although WWW documents can be stored and viewed in a non-net way, say,
on CD, the Mosaic application cannot be licensed for distribution.
The app itself is free and you can tell your customers where to get
it, but you cannot distribute it yourself. This may have changed in
recent months -- please let me know if you know otherwise. This little
catch makes Mosaic less than useful for distributong online help than,
say, MS Windows Help.

- HTML, the language WWW documents are written in, is a markup
language and is difficult to author by people who are used to WYSIWYG
tools. There are conversion programs from various packages (WP, MS Word,
FrameMaker), but in order to take advantage of HTML properly you cannot
be afraid of doing a little programming.

- HTML, as a markup language, is quite limited. You are restricted in
layout, design, and document structure. You have one font (with
bold and italic variations), and few to no special symbols. Multimedia
capabilities (graphics, sound, movies) are available, but formats are
limited (I'm not as familiar with this as I'd like to be).


Personally, I find WWW incredibly cool and fun to work with for my
personal documents and amusement. I'm not convinced it will work as a
distribution medium for online documentation without more freedom
of structure and more control over document contents.

Hope this helps; I'm also interested in other people's experiences with
WWW and HTML, so please do post to the list.

Laura
netweenie


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