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I added DVI support to NCSA Mosaic back in 1993-94, believing it to be a better format for "rich" documents than HTML or PDF. Nobody else seemed convinced :(
by PaulDavisThe1st 4mo ago
I added DVI support to NCSA Mosaic back in 1993-94, believing it to be a better format for "rich" documents than HTML or PDF.
Nobody else seemed convinced :(
- gjvc 4mo agopretty sure I remember reading about this with excitement and wonder ...
- dhosek 4mo agoThe problem with DVI is twofold: First, font support is purely by reference which means that you need some way of connecting the fonts used in the document with the DVI file. Use of the wrong font could produce some spectacularly bad output. Second, graphical support, other than rectangular boxes is only handled through the xxx opcode which never had any standardized meaning (although I tried). This limitation also applied to colors. Really, it was only with the final victory of PDF as the universal document format that these limitations were finally ameliorated.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4mo agoI would never advocate for DVI today. In 1993/94 ? It was a much stronger candidate, and given that any DVI (including images) could be rendered into PDF (or whatever), its supposed technical limitations at that time were not of much significance.
- stereo 4mo agoHtml back then had the same limitations.
- dhosek 4mo agoNot really. <img> was a first-class tag if not from the beginning, pretty early on and the same with color.