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

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.

[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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