News

In occasional web trawls to keep track of other developments along lines related to those described in these documents, the following titbits have been unearthed.

Quite recently, Microsoft has announced that it is to be bundling a product called Textures with copies of their Internet Explorer web browser.

Textures is a product with its origins in the company FutureTense. There are a couple of recent press releases from FT, one relating to their deal with Microsoft and one to the release of their program.

Despite the Textures product name, there does not seem to be much of a connection between the proposals in the documents here and Microsoft's announcement. The Textures product seems to have very little to do with textures, and a great deal to do with designing web pages in a user-friendly manner.

There does not seem to be any relevant activity at the intriguingly named TextureWeb site.

Within the algorithmic textures world, there is certainly much current activity. For details of some of this, visitors are referred to this site main textures links.

However, so far, almost none of this seems to be directed towards the bandwidth-critical applications discussed here.

There are a number of slightly relevant proposals being made from within the large number of organisations proposing object oriented vector graphics formats for the web. As an example of these, here is a link to the Xara page.