Netscape 4 Demoscene

[tcr]

My talk proposal is to start the Netscape 4 Demoscene movement. JavaScript Style Sheets, <ILAYER>, <BGSOUND>, the works.

I can expand on this once by Windows 95 VM boots up.

[tcr]

Update: I played around with JSSS, it's mostly broken (as in, none of the advertised dynamic capabilities actually work, rendering them functionally equivalent with CSS). Nonetheless, will probably use this tech instead of CSS.

I spent some time figuring out if I could get triangles rendering, which combined with absolute positioning with <LAYER> would yield some 3D demo capabilities. Unsurprisingly, multiple border colors absolutely are not possible in the 4.x series, stopping that research in its tracks. (Pretty results can be done with outset and inset, but only if you like top-right to bottom-left diagonals.)

However, Netscape 4 apparently has web fonts! Using the proprietary TrueDoc tech from Bitstream, you can load proprietary .pfr font files in your stylesheets. [1] Thankfully transparent layering works, so with a lot of manual alignment, it's possible to make a font of many triangle shapes and display them on-screen at any resolution and rendered in any RGB color. <LAYER> elements can be generated dynamically (no other element can) and now you've got yourself a stew.

Talk title is tentatively "Netscape 4D".

[1] http://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webrevu/1997/11_07/webauthors/11_07_97_2.html

[jennschiffer]

Thank you for submitting a talk to DHTMLConf. Even though this is a great talk idea and I think it's really interesting, I was unable to fit it into my lineup. I hope you can still make it to the event, as I have some Netscape questions to ask, like how much it costs and where I can buy it and

[tcr]

:crying_cat_face: