Britannica and Linux. Does it get any more pitiful 4970

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, JEDIDIAH wrote on Mon, 10 Oct 2005 12:41:41 -0500

Maybe not, but there's some information that might not be suitable for-representable in-best viewed in text form.

In a sense, HTML already is multimedia, since it can handle text and pictures. Moving pictures adds a third dimension, and audio a fourth. The good news is that HTML is standardized, as are PNG and JPEG (I don't know if GIF is but it's now off-patent and widely used). I'm not sure if multimedia is yet.

I would posit that it should be possible for a wikipedia to add multimedia content. The only things admittedly that comes to mind, however, are political ads such as a famous Goldwater (?) advert that shows a child plucking a daisy that mutates into a countdown, or famous clips from newsfiles such as "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Ronald Reagan Or maybe the ultimate sorrow in NASA's declaration of the destruction of Challenger (and later Columbia).

But there are so many others.

The flip side: multimedia tends to be far more hungry for storage than mere text; the wikipedia might bloat up to many times the size it should be if it includes too much. :-)

Not to mention the Eolas "906" patent, especially if one starts to think about what "embedded" really means; one cheap and probably not all that workable way of getting around the patent infringement inherent in running a program is to move the relevant code to a *library*, and have the browser load it as a plugin instead; is it external, or not, in that case? Another method is to simply bloat the browser by embedding the code therein for the more common stuff, and make a general hash of things thereby as the code continues to mutate.

(Regrettably, not all browsers support DHTML-Javascript techniques. Java's JEditorPane-JTextPane in particular doesn't know Javascript from a hole in the wall, although it probably could be extended into a true multimedia browser, with a bit of work.)

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.