wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: suggestion
Markus Altendorff 2005-Mar-11 10:41:00
preszaphod_b wrote:
> I noticed people were putting images in there entries last time that were being served from
> outside the WWP server. These could make nice additions to the "Making of" page and
> elsewere. Why not have a way of up loading a few image (maybe a 100-150KB limit). I
> know it would be that much more for the WWP servers, but in the long run it would make
> the archive that much better. There would be less chance of broken links, because poeple
> changed hosting providers and don't come back to update links.
>
> ----
> Grant Hermanson
This is something i've also thought about, but actually "the
other way 'round": After seeing that allowing HTML tags did make
it a bit more difficult to maintain a consistent layout, i
considered disabling HTML entirely in favour of a reduced set of
tags. Landis suggested that we'd use something like BBcode, which
i immediately recognized as something that i've never heard of
(not being the forum type of guy ;) and had to learn about first.
Anyway, for now, there's a decoder that understands these tags:
[b]bold[/b],
[i]italic[/i],
[h1]headline big[/h1]
[h2]headline less big[/h2]
[hr] horizontal lines
[url]http://web.addresses[/url]
[url="http://web.addresses?even[with]=dynamic&calls=in_the_url"]with
text acting as a link[/url]
and http://everything.that.starts.with.http.colon.dash.dash
becomes a hyperlink "all by itself".
It's not on the WWP server, this was just some offline doodling
for testing, but it is operational and would also visually
complain about non-nested tags and such. However, i have not
heard back from Don about that yet, and Landis had some valid
reservations about that being another new thing for participants
to know about.
Also, keep in mind that this would really restrict the individual
design decisions of those participating (though there is only a
small percentage of people actually using HTML on the WWP for
anything else beyond the hyperlinks).
Note: Mind you, I'm not blaming anyone for using HTML in the
first place! We're all still learning about that whole thing, and
there was never a policy about what you should use and what
better not... :) (reminder: copying a whole HTML page, tags and
everything, into the caption field really does make the layout go
"boom" and requires some low-level work to fix...)
With that out of the way, the idea of "embedding" images together
with the panorama upload offers a lot of options, like maps,
schematics etc. Technically, this is not too difficult to
implement. I'd go for a special BBcode-like tag like
[img="filename.gif"] or something instead of HTML for calling up
the images, and then make the server build the correct HTML tag
instead. Also, i'd recommend setting limits both in file size,
pixel size and number of images per user. Ultimately, this is up
to Don and Landis to decide, though. It's their (university's)
server after all.
Yours,
Markus