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

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

Pat Farrell wrote:

> Tim's approach to SLIP/PPP is the solution to the rest of his problems --
> wait until there is a compelling reason to change. Let the academics
> with time on their hands invent possible standards with incremental
> improvements at the cost of incompatibility. Eventually the tiller
> will be replaced with a steering wheel, and the brakes and accelerator
> controls will be two or three pedals.

Well said! The "bleeding edge" is consuming vast amounts of resources.
In my opinion, in this particular area, with little to show for it.

> Contrary to Tim's claim, ASCII is not the ideal way to read information.
> Fixed font, 78 character lines are hard to read. There is a reason that

I wasn't arguing that typeset, well-designed books are not easier on
the eyes. I was arguing that the efforts to produce some facsimile of
these typeset books in mail and News messages is a disaster. Line
length overruns, weird formats, etc.

(Since I'm on a roll with my ranting, let me rant about the explosion
of > 80 character width messages we're seeing. People have large text
windows, apparently, probably loaded with Hiroshige or Stone Serif or
whatever proportional font they like. Then they dump this into the 80
character world and, voila!, garbage. Netcom's new "Mosaic Lookalike"
does not even have an easy way to set the column width, unbelievably
enough! Hence the proliferation of NetCruiser ugly posts.)

> books are printed using proportional type on lines only two and a half
> alphabets wide -- it is easier for our eyes to read and our brains to
> comprehend. But studying typography is like studying cryptogrophy,

Oh, I'll go along with this. After all, this is partly why the terminal
standard is about 80 columns (there may be some FORTRAN and CRT
technology of the 1970s reasons as well).

My last, hopefully, word on this subject is that Arthur C. Clarke
wrote a short story about this whole matter. "Superiority." It was
regularly used in a class at MIT as an illustration of the dangers of
constantly being on the bleeding edge (before that term was invented)
and of becoming obsessive about having the absolute latest technology.

Eric's analysis in terms of Coase-type "transaction costs" is another
way to look at this. I shouldn't have to buy a shelf full of O'Reilly
and Associates books to do what I used to be able to do easily.

(Indeed, some people _love_ to buy such O'Reilly books. And some of
these books are indeed wonderful, teaching people how to do things
they couldn't have done before. Perl and remailers, for example.
Different strokes.)

I really do feel we're on the edge of chaos here. Every day that
passes I get more junk mail, more MIME mail, more > 80 column mail,
etc. Yes, the solution is for me to either filter this junk out
or to jump out out to the bleeding edge myself.

But many people won't. We risk losing our lingua franca in a
transition to chaos.

Complexity can be its own punishment. By not making having e-mail
easy enough to use, and by not having direct dial e-mail, most of the
business community adopted the much-inferior fax machine in the 1980s.
Much inferior in ways that are obvious, but also much more
"understandable." (You load your paper in the tray, dial the number of
your party, and it is done. No O'Reilly books need be read.)

John McCarthy wrote a great piece several years back on why and how
e-mail failed and fax machines won. E-mail is now making a serious
comeback, but may again stumble if ordinary users have to read books
on how to create PowerVisualMail clients and configure their SETENV
and CHARSET parameters!

--Tim May


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