Proceedings on CD

[Craig Bingman]

On Tue, 7 Nov 2000, GJ Gast wrote:

> 2. CD's are now 900 MB, undoubtably larger in 4 years. 

900 MB isn't a standard size, if it is even available.  My advice, if
people decide to go this route, is to strictly conform to standards.

> So 1000 authors 
> will have about 1 MB each for their paper. A paper can be written in any 
> format the author wishes. MS Word obviously, 

My suggestion would be to not use any proprietary formats.  RTF (Rich Text
Format) is fairly transportable.  As you mention, HTML is also fairly
transportable.

> but why not in HTML as a web page? 

HTML is in a constant state of flux.  Most people would probably create
HTML documents with Microsoft tools, and that usually means a
Microsoft-centric and somewhat incompatible version of HTML.  That said,
there are enough microsofties in the world that people usually are able to
read the rather junky HTML that MS tools make.

>From the perspective of putting things on the web or on CD, HTML may well
be the format of choice.

>Colours can be used, tables, graphs, pictures, models, 

And of course some attention should be given to the graphics formats
included.  Probably the GIF format shouldn't be allowed.  JPEG typically
seriously degrades technical figures, so some sort of widely readable and
lossless format should be used for technical figures.  Non-critical
photographs could be JPG'd to save space.

> 7. If the structure of the CD is written in HTML the whole thing can easily be 
> made available through a webpage as well.

A CD has another advantage... it can be exhaustively searched for strings
using a program on the user's computer.

I'm not sure if a "University" would be hosting a possible web site.  If
so, then there usually isn't a direct cost for bandwidth.  There may be a
direct cost for storage space, which could be nontrivial if you are going
to need to store a gigabyte on-line for extended periods of time.  I don't
think it would be cost effective at all to use a commercial web host to do
something like this.

Craig

cbingman at panix.com   
http://fpage1.ba.best.com/~cbingman