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For some odd reason this post reminded me of a short story by Borges called The Garden of Forking Paths (which is short and well worth the read). It's an unusual solution to the problem of how to communicate using a limited and noisy channel...

(Offtopic) I don't have enough information to comment on this new technology, but I can say high dynamic range displays mentioned by this parent post rock. Here are a few links if you want to know what/how they are: 1 2 3

Why was there no (aparant) consideration for based-on styles? CSS, using rules based on how tags are nested, seems to necessitate a direct link between style and a pages structure (read: content).

A link that sums some of my frustrations: http://www.cybergrain.com/archives/2004/12/css_con sidered.html

Thanks for any insight.
Andy

High Dynamic Range is also a useful tool in photography, especially for digital photographers who find that the useful dynamic range of a digital camera is less than that of an equivalent film camera. Multiple-exposure bracketing can be combined with the use of special processing software in order to yield images that would be difficult to obtain with a digital camera, or sometimes even a film camera.

Photoshop CS2 includes this technology out of the box (Photoshop CS2 HDR) -- in the demo page, notice that the sky is properly exposed as well as the vegetation on the hill in the foreground; this would be impossible to capture with many cameras. As the article linked by the original post states,

"HDR, or High Dynamic Range, is ... designed to emulate ... lighting to closely mirror the changes we see in the real world."

And indeed that's what the photographic equivalent does. Unlike a camera, our eyes can properly "expose" the ground as well as they can the sky in the same scene. In fact, this is mentioned on pages 2 and 3 of the linked article in the original post.

More:

HDR - High Dynamic Range Compression - a Photoshop plugin

The Future of Digital Imaging - High Dynamic Range Photography (HDR)

Aizu University's Atrium High Dynamic Range Source Images

High dynamic range imaging - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stitched HDRI

If you would like to try this yourself, many digital cameras have a bracketing feature. I'd suggest at least five exposures, separated by one half stop or one full stop. However, it does not work well for moving objects since there will be a short amount of time that elapses between exposures.

Here is my first attempt:

High Dynamic Range Candy Corn

This particular shot was taken with a Canon EOS 1Ds MkII camera and manual bracketing, although I've made other successfull attempts with the bracketing feature of my Nikon D70.

Digital has thus far failed to meet one unavoidable reality.

We observe in analog...

the pixels in a digital image shouldn't be aligned.. they should be slightly random.. the frames in video/computer monitors should be a constant sequence of random photons. Digital audio should be Hi Def and slightly fuzzy and data storage should have a level of redundancy.

Until that is met, purists will continue to dislike the tech.

That said, HDR cameras (http://www.cybergrain.com/tech/hdr/) and HD cameras will revolutionise (even more so) the imaging world.

If I can see a scene, capture it with a single click and later frame it, adjust the colours display it on a high dynamic range monitor, or modify the image so the mountains are as visible as the sun setting behind them, then I say this overcomes a *massive* shortcoming of current and previous cameras.

I don't care for the "art" of technical photography. The real art is in seeing and capturing the images.. the technical side is a clumsy romanticised inconvenience.

See ''CSS considered unstylish''.

If you ask me, the biggest problem is the lack of reference implementations. Seven years (or whatever) after the final release of CSS2, nobody, and I mean nobody, has provided a 100% working implementation of CSS2. Firefox et al come close, but it looks like implementing CSS is just too damn hard.

The problem may lie in the W3C approach: ''specs come first, implementations can follow later''. Compare this to the IETF approach where working implementations are required for a standard to be approved.

With the current approach that the W3C is using, you can end up with things like CSS2 that take years to implement properly even though we're just talking about a system for applying styling to HTML.