Re:
> ABC News has put up a particularly nice web page that I just found, but one
> that I think is indicative of the way that the web is going to go.
...
>      http://www.abcnews.go.com/onair/nightline/NightlineIndex.html

As nice as that is (ignoring the apparent lack of closed captioning ... I'm
guessing there's an audio track, but since I generally have my speakers turned
off, I can't be sure),
I have to differ...that's not the way the web is going.  (Although it
may be the wave of the future for web-based multimedia presentations!)

The web is going towards its roots: static pages.  Why?  Simple statistics.
The creation of audio/video pages takes a lot of time/effort/storage, so
they'll always be the tiniest fraction of of pages.  That doesn't mean that
such pages won't be sought after, or highly popular, of course!
(Note that I'm basing the argument on number of pages, not the size of pages :)

Altavista reports about 175 million pages that are some kind of
text (htm/html/txt/etc.), and about 1.2 million pages with mpeg/mpg/avi.
Of course, many (most?) of those 1.2 million pages are text pages that have
one of those words on it (hmmm...people talk about video more than they do
video :).  I searched for url:mpeg or url:mpg or url:av and got
abotu 32,000 hits ... but every one of the two dozen I checked was a text page.

So, how can I count how many video pages are out there?  I don't know!

I tried doing a video search in altavista (via http://www.altavista.com/cgi-
bin/query?mmdo=9&stype=svideo) and entered "*" for the search pattern ...
and got 1 million hits.  Assuming all 1 million are videos, that's a 100 to 1
ratio of non-video to video pages.

But, that's going to miss the hundreds of streaming videos, and others as well.

Oh well, it was an interesting exercise.  To borrow from Alfredo: I've got to
get back to work on those boring text web pages that people want to read.

SS
those
Stan Sieler                                           [log in to unmask]
www.allegro.com/sieler/wanted/index.html          www.allegro.com/sieler