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FWIW, here is the situation regarding PNG on Mac browsers:

• Netscape Communicator 4.5: Yes
• Internet Explorer 4.01: NO!
• iCab Preview 1.5 ( http://www.icab.de): YES! (but no JavaScript support yet)

• Guy Ouellette
  guy.ouellette@NOSPAM.ri.cgocable.ca

Another thing is that the package is made up of thousands of little files. Whatever happened to the convention that an application is made up of one application and maybe a shared library or data file. I have never seen an application with so many separate data files. Have they ever heard of a resource fork?!

p.s. I would run linux but my mac is one of the few that has unsupported hardware. I do have a pc sitting next to me with the case open that will run linux as soon as I can get a cd drive for it and a bugger hd.

The iCab browser for the Mac has built in image filtering which can be set up to kill most banner ads if you want it to.

To make what I'm thinking of possible, you'd need to have a standard indexing format. I'm sure Microsoft has one we can use, as long as half the links point back to them :)

Isn't that part of what the META tag is for? Or the LINK tag?

Looking over my copy of the HTML 4.0 specification, there's not a specified list of META attributes, but maybe the following should be considered standard for search engines:

• "description": for an overview of your page
• "keywords": give something for spiders to index by

The following LINK attributes should be set also:

• "home": Topmost level of your site
• "copyright": Copyright info
• "made": Author information

That way, a search result could take the format of:

• Page Title
• META description
• URL
• Home LINK attribute
• Author name (or webmaster of a larger site)
• Copyright information
• Keyword relevancy

The best thing about the LINK attributes is that at least one browser, iCab, provides a set of buttons for several LINK attributes -- start, end, next, prev, home, search, help, made, etc. Too bad it's MacOS only; maybe someone could create a similar set of buttons for Mozilla?

Anyway, Altavista, Yahoo, Infoseek, etc... could make deals with the big ISP's/web host services such as Mindspring, Netcom, Earthlink, Geocities, Tripod, etc... Those sites would then index their own sites, which would save your spider/crawler a lot of time.

Now there's a thought! Then meta-search engines like Metacrawler could have more meaningful returns.

Am I the only one that thinks a search engine should be a commodity? I don't care which search engine I use, so long as I get the best results. (Keeping paid advertisements out of the search results would be a benefit, too...)

There is still the issue of other sites not located on these big ISP's, like .edu's and ibm.com's.

Maybe someone should consider an EduSearch search engine, indexing only sites under the .edu domain? (Especially if its index can be used by a larger metasearch engine...)

As for ibm.com and the like, large corporate web sites should have some form of search facility; an Alertbox column from UseIT.com discussing corporate intranets says that having some form of search facility should be considered essential -- I don't see why the same shouldn't be true for their Web shingle as well.

Jay (=

PS: Rob!! here are some features that would really help this site's
usability.

Woohoo! I'm not the only one who reads UseIT on here! Jakob Neilsen gives some good, free advice on that site.

HTML validation, link validation, spell checking, and grammar checking.

Are you talking about spelling and grammar for comments, or in general? I've seen some scary typos in story titles...

I wonder how much overhead adding pelling/grammer checking to the "Post a Comment" functions?

I just switched to iCab on my Mac, and it's a great browser that also does HTML checking on pages you're looking at. (Make iCab smile!) It also has a button bar for the new HTML 4.0 attributes (UseIT does a good write-up on it.

Oh, and ditto on the code release. *grin*

Jay (=