Re: HTML icon set was: Additions to the CGI archive

Bert Bos (bert@let.rug.nl)
Sat, 8 Jan 1994 14:43:53 +0100 (MET)


Guido van Rossum writes:

|> >> So if anyone is designing an HTML icon set (is anyone doing that?)
|> >> I think it would be a good idea to consider this larger set.
|>
|> > What says the author of the HTML+ draft and the WWW gurus. A signal from
|> > there could help to initiate first steps.
|
|> Lets get some graphics artists to work on a really cool set of icons
|> (as good as Mosaic's world icon), which we can all share.
|
|Hmm... Shouldn't we first agree on an abstract set of icons with
|(fuzzy) semantics attached to them before letting the artists loose?
|I can imagine that different clients (assuming there is life after
|Mosaic :-) may use different icon styles, corresponding to the style
|of the rest of their user interface (e.g. monochrome, grayscale 3D
|look, "MTV look", ...) with the same semantics (e.g. file, folder,

I agree, to the point that it would be nice if HTML doc authors could
rely on the availability of some standard set of symbols. But why
should they be images?

My suggestion: create a set of entities (&file;, &folder;, etc.) like
the set that already exists for accented characters (é, ë,
etc.). If we agree on this, maybe Dave Raggett could add such a list
to the HTML+ draft?

Browser developers are then free to display those entities in whatever
way they like. Either as an "ASCII graphic", a bitmap, or a character
from a special symbols font.

Btw. ISO is standardizing the names and approximate look of a small
set of "desktop" icons. I don't have the drafts here at home, but we
should definitely use their names.

Bert

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