Re: TODO additions

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     You don't think W3 should be able to render stuff which essentially
>     depends on them?  I agree that the main use of HTML background images
>     is to make pages more-or-less unusable, but that's not the point.
> 
> I wasn't thinking in terms of W3, but now that you mention it,
> why *isn't* that the point?

I think that a browser should be able to render such stuff regardless.
In some cases pages are actually unusable without the background
because of what losing `designers' have put on top.

>     Anyhow, I think there are other applications of miles' implementation,
>     which is what I was thinking of.
> 
> What are the other applications?

I seem to have misunderstood or mis-remembered the implementation, so
maybe I shouldn't comment.

>     >     * Convert the XPM bitmaps to PPM, replace the PBMs with them and scrap
>     >       the XPMs so that the colour versions work generally.  (Requires care
>     >       with the colour used for the transparent regions.)
>     > 
>     > Could someone explain what good this would do?
> 
>     Surely it's useful not to have to maintain two versions of each (or
>     nearly each) image, and code to deal with them?
> 
> Could you explain the connection?

PPM does colour and is supported generally, so it may be able to
replace both PBM and XPM.

> You're being rather terse, and I
> don't understand the situation enough to understand.  I don't know
> anything about these image formats except their names.  I don't know
> their capabilities, and I don't know which systems support them.

Stefan has already explained more if I wasn't explicit enough before.
I thought this was documented somewhere, but if not, I guess it should
be.

Whether this works or not depends on the Emacs image-handling code
dealing well with the chosen background for the image (since PPM
doesn't have transparency) and how the images behave on monochrome and
greyscale displays.  Even if you need to keep PBM for the such
displays it would be worth having colour images available on all
platforms when they display colour.