Subject: Re: portable data format for CD ROM graphics

From: [email-masked] (Bob Myers)
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 1994 04:18:06 GMT

>>>>> In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Richard Ottolini) writes:

> In article <[email-masked]>,
> James Huang <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>In article <[email-masked]>, [email-masked] (Richard
>>Ottolini) wrote:
>>
>>> I think the multi-media market has pretty much answered this question.
>>> Use whatever is "standard" in Mosaic and its clones. There is tremendous
>>> activity in the computer world in improving these tools- the most
>>> notable being Microsoft's announcement of their intended
>>> product at Comdex this week.
>>
>>NCSA Mosaic is currently limited to GIFs from what I have read.  MCom
>>Netscape handles JPG.  So does Chimera.

> More precisely, they are designed to handle any format as long as
> a file name extension and interpreter/renderer for that extension
> are defined.  However, you are approximately correct that most standard
> distributions only have GIF and XBM. There is no ostacle I see to for
> example, define .su as the Seismic UNIX extension and using the suximage
> renderer to display such.

It's not a "file extension" issue, really.  WWW uses MIME types, not file
extensions, to determine what a file is.  The server side sets the MIME
type.   Thus, WWW browsers know that it's a GIF file because the WWW server
told it that it was sending a "image/gif" type.   The servers tend to use
file extensions to set the MIME type, but this is not necessarily the case.

Mosaic uses file extensions as a backup method, but really, this is a server
side issue; depending on setting file extensions in the browser is
non-standard and will probably break in the future.  We will need to define
MIME types for seismic data to solve this problem.

--
Bob Myers                              Unocal Corporation
Internet: [email-masked]      Information Systems Support
Phone: [714] 693-6951                  P. O. Box 68076
                                       Anaheim, California 92817-8076