WWW: Beyond the Basics

26. The Future of Imaging on the Web

26.4 Summary

Photo CD manifestation of imaging technology, which was developed by Kodak1, has proven to be an important tool in many applications. There are many prospectives for this technology in the future, such as in police investigations, astronomy and other scientific curricula. It is only natural, therefore, that this technology is incorporated into the fast developing World Wide Web. It was shown how easy it is to merge the two technologies into one powerful tool that goes well beyond the scope of photography.

There are still some obstacles, such as image loading time and browser availability, which need to be addressed. However, some solutions, which are discussed in other parts of this book, are being developed. For intance, a bandwidth increase and/or making the Photo CD format much more compressed are appropriate solutions in improving the image loading time (currently, a typical Photo CD file for a single photograph has a size of about 4-5Mb, which needs to be accessed for each operation). The problem of lack of a widespread Photo CD aware browser for all architectures will probably be resolved soon by just looking at the rate of version upgrades for the current browsers. It is anticipated that Photo CD aware browsers will be widespread on a very short time scale (almost all recent versions of current browsers are now Java aware).

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1Kodak is a trademark of Eastman Kodak Company
Copyright © 1996 Dan Haim, All Rights Reserved

Dan Haim <haim@vt.edu>
Last modified: Sun Dec 15 17:18:55 EST 1996