On June 16, Chuck McManis wrote:
> >On Fri, 16 Jun 2000, Dave McGuire wrote:
> > > 1) It's just not necessary for effective communications.
>
> No, smoke signals work as well. Everyone on this knows that THIS IS
> SHOUTING and *this* is an emphatic point. HTML gives you better markup than
> case and punctuation symbols. Sending :-) is not as intuitive as sending
> the smiley face symbol.
It's just as intuitive to me...and to you as well, I'm sure, Chuck.
It's all a matter of what one is used to.
Sure, one summer day about nineteen years ago I asked a friend what
that strange-looking colon-hyphen-closeparen deal was that I was
seeing all over the place. He grabbed my head and wrenched it
sideways and I learned what a "smiley" was all about. Sure, it wasn't
immediately intuitive...but nowadays, I can't see a colon anywhere near a
paren without my mind converting it into some sort of face!
> > > 2) It's a waste of bandwidth and system resources.
>
> Again false. There is less waste due to the <html>/</html> and
> <font></font> tags than there is from idiots that include a 600 line rant
> and tag "I agree" on to the end. To steal a phrase, HTML doesn't waste
> bandwidth, people do. :-) Correctly constructed, HTML is pretty efficient
> at capturing added typographical information. Mailers that insist on
> sending both an HTML version and a plain version are broken in my opinion.
I agree with the "people do" point...but the HTML mail that I see is
typically bloated by 20-50% past the original text. Sure, if it were
all nice, efficient hand-coded HTML it could be a lot better...but
it's NOT. It's coming out of dumbass Windows software and is bloated
as hell.
> > > 3) Technical people generally want genuine functionality to
> > > prevail over "flash"...which is why many (most) technical people
> > > in the industry (Visual Basic programmers don't count) don't
> > > have Windows boxes on their desks if they have anything to say
> > > about it.
>
> HTML and windows are not tied as closely as you might think. Since HTML was
> developed at CERN on Sun UNIX boxes it was tied at the time more closely to
> UNIX. However, it is genuinely functional if I can include a diagram
> in-line with my text that is _not_ composed of ascii characters and thus
> won't be gobbledy gook when you see it.
I'm quite intimately familiar with the history of HTML & HTTP...and
while I do agree with your statement of functionality, using HTML
for any sort of diagramming is a stretch at best.
Formatting/coloring/sizing text, sure...but diagramming??
> > > 4) It's a clear outgrowth of the overcommercialization of the Internet,
> > > in which uneducated users think the World Wide Web *IS* the
> > > Internet, thus they try to cram the World Wide Web into
> > > everything they do, and conversely, cram everything they do into
> > > the World Wide Web.
>
> You are confusing HTTP with HTML. HTML was explicitly designed so that a
> "modern" computer (one that had a bitmapped screen rather than a terminal)
> could be taken advantage of when you were *exchanging* documents. It was a
> lot simpler than the printer description languages of the day, (and PDF
> today) and, when tied with a convention (the URL) and a network protocol,
> it could "link" related documents rather than include them and thus waste
> precious bandwidth.
Not at all. As I mentioned above I'm quite familiar with the
history of both. Please reread my #4 point above with this in mind:
I'm speaking completely from the standpoint of the *current* popular
use of this technology...not the original reasons for its development.
I apologize for not being more clear about that originally.
-Dave McGuire
Received on Fri Jun 16 2000 - 18:24:14 BST
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