On 5/18/00 4:00 AM, Kevin Miller at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On 18/5/00 1:12 am, Scott Raney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>>> We considered this, but rejected it because I've seen many stacks that
>>>> change the current directory to select different sets of images or
>>>> movies (e.g., to support multiple languages), something that wouldn't
>>>> work if you hard-wired the image/player paths to be relative to the
>>>> stack path. This isn't an issue with stackFiles AFAIK, probably
>>>> because using separate *stacks* for the different languages isn't a
>>>> good design. Any other suggestions?
>>>
>>> I get it. I do have another suggestion: search the directory first as is
>>> done now. If (and only if) that results in file not found, search relative
>>> to the current stack?
>>
>> Sounds kind of unreliable to me. Sure it may be unlikely, but what if
>> the current directory happens to have a file of the same name as some
>> media file you're trying to access in the folder where your stack is?
>> You might get the wrong image displayed, or worse, it would display
>> the right image in your development environment and then fail later on
>> in the distributed version because that image really *isn't* in the
>> folder with the stack like you thought it was...
>
> An alternative might be an object property useDirectory or similar that
> defaulted to the current behaviour but could be turned off? Or perhaps this
> should be a global property? (I'm sure someone could think of a better name
> for it anyway.)
I probbly won't get any points here by using HTML as a baseline, but
whenever we think about storing media separately from the document at least
it makes a familiar model:
In HTML, the default behavior is to have media reference partial paths
relative to the document making the reference. There is an option which
allows one to specify a different base path, kinda like the directory
property, but this is an option which must be explicitely set up by the
user.
I don't have a strong argument for the technical merits of such an approach,
but I would suggest that the model would be immediately graspable to users.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Multimedia Design and Development for Mac, Windows, UNIX, and the Web
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