Xara's related work

As an example of others who are at work in producing algorithmic texture formats for the internet, readers are referred to the pages of Xara Ltd.

To quote from Xara's technical specification appendices for their Advanced Internet Graphics format:

Fractal fills. These naturalistic, and surprisingly common object fill styles require practically no file space. The description of the fill style requires less than a dozen words of memory. An excellent example of a fractal fill style is the Microsoft 'clouds in a blue sky' effect as used on all Windows 95 artwork.

This indicates the compression generated by algorithmic textures is attractive to other object-oriented graphics proposals.

However, I suspect that due to their origins and proposed market, Xara's Fractal fills are not entirely well suited to the purpose of generating tesselating backdrop tiles. They can be resized, but it is doubtful whether they can exhibit, for example, scaling invariance.

Other aspects of Xara's proposals are of considerable interest, and for more details, Xara are at http://www.xara.co.uk.