The Bitmap Brothers' plans

Quite recently, the author of these documents was approached over the telephone by a group of people calling themselves the bitmap brothers. These people claimed to have studied the proposals being made here, and that they do not think that they are workable largely because they are too complicated and difficult to implement on a range of platforms.

There did seem to be some agreement on one point; that sending backgrounds down low bandwidth channels is a problem that needs to be addressed. However, the bitmap brothers seemed to have some kind of vested interest in a particular set of bitmap textures, which they claimed had been come up with by a bunch of psychologists as being the most soothing and relaxing backgrounds for reading text on. When further enquiries were made about what they meant by this, confusing references to dreamy blue skies and little fluffy clouds were mentioned!

The bitmap brothers seemed to think that their textures were going to be on the machines which people were running their browsers on anyway, and that all that was needed would be for the web browser to specify which of their special backgrounds would be needed, with a configurable default texture, if no background was specified.

Of course, being bandwidth conscious, the author proceeded to ask them how they were planning to store these textures, and was told that a special wavelet compression technique was to be used. This (so they said) provided better compression ratios than JPEGs and was near-lossless in terms of its quality.

They were then asked what they envisaged the textures being used for on all the platforms they seemed to be referring to, but then the gentleman on the other end of the telephone began humming what sounded like an old Beatles number. Intrigued, the author allowed him to continue for a few moments, but then the connection suddenly went dead, and the number turned out to have been retained by the caller.

Naturally, the author is curious to hear more about the bitmap brothers. If anyone has any information concerning their plans, please do get in touch.