Jon Ingram wrote:
rnmscott@netspace.net.au wrote:
Interesting idea. I had never even thought of chess works, despite having actually read this, way back when, I think.
How would you do it, with images? Some of them could be pretty big, with lots of board positions. Re-doing them as ascii boards like on old chess servers wouldn't be too much fun, but possible?
Symbols for all the chess pieces are in Unicode (see http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf ), but I don't image the glyphs are in all that many fonts!
Having lots of images isn't that big a problem, especially if the images are only black-and-white.
Another approach to consider, and with any highly formatted textual objects where "layout is content" [note], is to use SVG to represent the chess board positions. With animated SVG, one should even be able to show the move-by-move board positions. SVG rendering engines are getting to be ubiquitous. The Mozilla engine includes support for some flavor of SVG. Jon [note: such things as ultra-complex tables, poetry and prose where the position of the text itself communicates content, etc., are types of content amenable to representation using SVG.]