I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap

[Jonathan Rochkind]

At 2:19 AM 11/19/94, Timothy C. May wrote:
>Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>...
>> return to the amount of work you put in.  A well done html document is, in
>> my opinion, actually much easier to read then a straight ascii document,
>> and the amount of effort neccesary to turn ascii to html is relatively
>> minimal.
>
>Well, I've looked at maybe 50 home pages now, with "lynx," and I'm not
>convinced that html docs are "much easier to read" than straight text.
>Perhaps the "well done" qualifier is what I haven't yet seen (but 50
>home pages is a pretty fair sample).

I think I might not have made my point clear enough.  I meant to say that
an html document, viewed with a program that displays different headings in
different fonts and sizes and stuff (note that the writer doesn't have to
deal with font and size issues herself) are much easier to read. Meaning,
"an html document viewed on anything but lynx". In my opinion. An html
document viewed with lynx _is_ pretty much straight text, isn't it? So it's
not going to be much easier to read then straight text, obviously.

>In any case, the problem is not just html. On a Smalltalk mailing list
[various problems]

I agree there are problems like that. Much of the problem is due to lack of
tools on the user-end of it. Which is a completely different thing from the
issue of the author spending too much time on inane prettifying, form over
content, etc.  Still an important issue. Until nearly everyone _is_ able to
use a graphical web browser, html isn't going to be as useful as it could
be. Until there are easy or automatic ways to use PGP, it's not going to be
as easy to send and receive PGP mail as it could be. Until everyone has a
MIME-compatible mailer that behaves reasonably and can be configured to do
whatever one wants it to do... etc.  This is a legitimate issue, but not
the same one as the form over content thing you were foaming about earlier.
:)

>
>My point? Much wheel-spinning. Like trying to read Amanda's "X11" GIF,
>and then wondering if my Netcom disk quota was being sucked up by a
>hidden file somewhere! Or jumping through hoops to download a
>PGP-encrypted note to my home machine, decrypting it, only to find a
>"Like, wow, this PGP sure is neat! Like, rock on, dude!" message
>awaiting me!

All due to lack of proper tools to deal with this stuff, I'd argue. If you
had a MIME compatible mailer that displayed Amanda's GIF inline, or did
something logical with it, or just tossed it in the bit bucket cause you
told it to, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Yes, not everyone (or
possibly anyone) has that capability at the moment, and that's a good
point.  [I know you asked not to have advice, but I'll quickly say that
I've found that using the Eudora-compatible PGP-related applescripts makes
it _immeasurably_ easier to deal with PGP stuff. Decrypting a PGP-encrypted
note is a single mouse click.  Lack of tools is what makes it a problem]

>We are getting bogged down in banal details and platform
>idiosyncracies. Dozens of platforms, dozens of flavors of Unix and
>other operating systems, half a dozen major display options (as noted
>above), lots of image formats (at least that's relatively
>standardized, to GIF, PICT, JPEG, etc....and yet many people spend
>_days_ trying to convert, download, uncompress, read, display, etc.)

I agree that it's important _not_ to get bogged down in banal details, or
platform idiosyncracies.
The point of such things as MIME and HTML are to avoid both of these
things. The MIME and HTML specifications are completely
platform-independent, and their whole purpose is basically to take care of
the banal details so humans don't have to. Whether theory matches practice
is another issue.

> There's got to be a better way.

The net is evolving. I _like_ the fact that I can option-click on a ftp URL
in my newsreading software, and have that URL automatically fetched. I
don't like the fact that Eudora _automatically_ fetched the documents
referenced by the MIME voodoo in that recent contribution to the list, but
if it had merely shown "referenced document: 1994.Standards", and allowed
me to option-click on that (or ignore it) to download it if I wished, I
would have liked that too.

At one point ASCII _wasn't_ a standard.  It was never quite such a problem
as we have now, admittedly, but it's not as powerful as what we are on the
verge of having now either. Once MIME compatible mailers work right, and
the user interaction issues are taken care of the right way, and everyone
has a direct high-bandwith net connection, I firmly believe that MIME and
html will be of enormous utility. No, I'm not holding my breath for that to
happen, but technology has a way of moving faster then you would expect
(and at times slower then you would expect too. but unpredictable nearly
always).

Or maybe I'm just a hopeless techno-phile.