Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

[I'm enjoying this discussion, and think it may have some relevance to
issues about tools and complexity, so I'm leaving it public. If you
don't wish to read it, delete it now. No extras "MIME" screenfuls,
either!]

I will try to limit myself to just a few of Jonathan's points.

Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

> 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.

I wasn't referring to fonts, shapes, sizes, but to logical
organization and overall quality. In my view, fonts and
differently-sized headers rarely make much of a difference. And to the
extent people worry about style sheets for their Web writings, I think
my earlier point about form-over-substance applies.

> 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
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ah! Now you've hit on a topic of crucial importance! The "if the user
had proper tools, he could read my work" point of view, so often
expressed.

This comes up in lots of ways. Basically, people just _won't_ adopt a
set of tools, usually, Sometimes they will. Some random points related
to this (I lack the will this late at night to put the points into
proper essay form):

* Backward compatibility. Color t.v. needed to work on black and white
t.v.s...and, indeed, today's video signal will work on sets built in
1948. There are drawbacks to this, of course, but it's often esential.

* ASCII text has heretofore served as the "NTSC" of computer screens,
so that my words, written on a PowerMac 7100AV (video digitizer, etc.)
can still be "tuned in" by a dumb terminal, an IBM PC, and Apple IIe,
etc.

* Saying that problems would be solved if only the users would get the
latest tools (and perhaps switch platforms, as their platform may not
support the tools) is like saying that television viewers should
switch to HDTV. They will, many of them, but not for a while.

* (This especially applies to the as-expected advice from some that
Eudora is the best solution to automatically getting MIME-doohickeyed
attachments. Many list subscribers out there just don't have these
capabilities...) 

> 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

The issue is that our clever tools are, in my opinion, burying us. I
don't begrudge folks the fun they have, or the work they get done, by
using these new tools. I may start posting Quicktime movies of
Cypherpunks meetings..."Hit Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift if you do
NOT wish to receive a 650 MB Quicktime file." 

What I am saying is that I don't plan to spend gobs of times hunting
down JPEG-Diddler 4.7 so I can view an image somebody sends me, or
Acrobat 3.1 ("upgrade is $99 for Acrobat 3.0 owners") so I can read a
document!

> 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.

Perhaps it is time for us to again poll the list about what tools they
have, what mailers they use, etc. (Done two years ago, pre-Web,
pre-SLIP, etc., mostly to see what mailers and editors needed PGP
hooks the most. A tower of Babel, even then.)

Until, say, >70% of the list has MIME/HTML/Web capabilities, working
without bugs, I say we ought to try to keep our focus on ASCII and not
on sound clips, Quicktime movies, etc. (The "without bugs" point bears
elaboration. When I sue lynx to access a site, get/fetch a file, and
then sz it directly to my home machine, it arrives with a "38376.html"
form, and is unopenable by my apps. When, instead, I skip the
automatic sz, and manually sz it, it arrives as it should be, e.g.,
"Eudora2.1.sea" or whatever. I'm sure someone knows the incantation to
make it work, but this is the nonobvious banality I'm talking about.)

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

Indeed, we probably all are, in varous ways. 

But just as an "audio tweak" can spend all his spare time aligning the
polarities of his wall sockets, and just as a desktop publishing
"tweak" can spend all of her time fiddling with spacings, sizes of
descenders, and can print 17 test copies of a page, so too can we get
bogged down in all the neat toys we have to play with.

Me, I think I'm just going on a personal crusade to simplify things.
Computers should not be making my life _vastly more complicated_.

One last note: I read my mail on-line, interspersed with reading
NetNews. Although I have Eudora, and of course use it, I don't use it
for routine work (for one thing, it may take 20 minutes to download my
mail, so I tend to use it when I'm heading out to do something else,
or to go to sleep, etc.). So all the "solutions" that involve using
Eudora are not my cup of tea. That's just the way it is.

The tower of Babel is rising in the shadow of Babylon.

--Tim May


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