When the media browser is asked to display certain kinds of media not typically used on the World Wide Web, WWWeasel will attempt to automatically convert the file to the appropriate type. Given the diversity of application and platform-specific image media types available, WWWeasel's ability to automatically convert image formats to de-facto Web formats (e.g. GIF) is essential in allowing engineers facility with image media in creating engineering notebook entries in WWWeasel. We believe that the ability to manage multimedia in a straightforward, automatic, fashion is going to be one of the most important factors in getting engineers to use this new medium effectively. Typically media conversions are tedious, error-prone, yet concentration-breaking tasks that are simply a frustration and hinderance.
Color images (e.g. SGI ``.RGB'', ``tiff'', Kodak Photo CD formats) are automatically converted to GIF, which is the HTML 2.0 standard format for presenting color images on the web. Since WWWeasel's initial design, `` netscape'' and HTML 3.0 have begun to use JPEG images for both in-line and external display of ``photographic'' images. WWWeasel will handle JPEG external images, but now needs to be updated to display netscape-style in-line JPEG images. Future versions of WWWeasel will attempt to look at the number of input colors of an image automatically convert to JPEG if the image appears to be ``photographic'', while GIFs will be the output format for images that appear to be ``drawings'' using relatively small numbers of colors.