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

tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May) wrote:
>And now that Mosaic and Netscape are such big deals (which I'm not
>knocking, though--true to form--I use the character-based "lynx" to
>access the Web), I expect a swing of the pendulum in the other
>direction, toward a time-wasting focus on kerning, fonts, leading,
>whitespace, gutter widths, etc.

Actually, I see the benefit of html to be that you really _don't_ spend
time on pretty visual effects like kerning, fonts, leading, whitespace,
gutter widths, etc.  You don't deal with any of those things, or anything
like it, in a html document.  Yes, you spend more time doing formatting
then with straight ascii, but the structure you put in is content based
structure, rather then pretty-but-useless display based structure.  The
type that you were doing with outliners and such, although for the goal of
making them more readable rather then of helping to organize ideas.  But I
think html, once you've gotten the hang of it, gives you a pretty good
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.

Just my opinion, of course. I agree with you that there is a problem when
too much time and energy is spent on prettifying trimming rather then on
content, but I'm not sure that html is really representative of this.

Have you tried using MacWeb with the auto-loading of images turned off?
Like I said, I find it easier to extract the relevant information quickly
out of a html-formatted text then a straight ascii text.  And we all know
that when you are on the net, being able to extract relevant information
quickly is vital.  (There's a whole nother treatise waiting to be written
there.)

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).

In any case, the problem is not just html. On a Smalltalk mailing list
I'm on, for example, they're grappling with how to distribute docs to
us over the Net. A tower of Babel! Html, Replica (tm), FrameView (tm),
PostScript (tm), and Acrobat (tm) are just some of the options. As of
last night, they (the vendor running the list) couldn't even give us
a _price list_ because they'd generated the price list using the nice
table features of FrameMaker, but then couldn't extract the text...so
we had to wait to get onto their ftp site (limit of 3 at a time) and
"get" the Replica (tm) version! (Replica is like Adobe's "Acrobat.")

(And if _they_ can't get the plain text out of their fancy-formatted
document, how the hell can we get it out and into our spreadsheets?
Answer, by cutting-and-pasting, if it still works. [Please don't send
me "workaounds."])

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!

I'm trying not to just flame. I see these "neat things" as a tower of
Babel. I see mail breaking down as folks deviate from ASCII and
"overload" it with extra cruft.

I see a proliferation of "gurus" and "wizards" needed to make things
work. [A recurring theme of this note is that people are very helpful,
and send advice. But little of the advice is usable, for various
reasons. So don't send it to me! :-} ]

> Just my opinion, of course. I agree with you that there is a problem when
> too much time and energy is spent on prettifying trimming rather then on
> content, but I'm not sure that html is really representative of this.
> 
> Have you tried using MacWeb with the auto-loading of images turned off?
> Like I said, I find it easier to extract the relevant information quickly
> out of a html-formatted text then a straight ascii text.  And we all know
> that when you are on the net, being able to extract relevant information
> quickly is vital.  (There's a whole nother treatise waiting to be written
> there.)

No, I haven't tried MacWeb, or NetScape, except as demos and on the
machines of others. I don't have a SLIP or PPP connection

(Please don't send me helpful tips on how to get such accounts! It
seems that every time I mention such things, I get several notes
suggesting how all would be solved if I switched to Unix, abandoned
Netcom, got my own T1 line, etc. Folks, I'm flattered that you care,
but the reason I don't have SLIP or PPP is because I haven't bothered
yet. Waiting for 28.8 vs. ISDN to shake out, waiting for a local
provider to appear to my satisfaction--don't tell me about either
ScruzNet or SenseMedia, as I know about them--and, most importantly,
waiting for a _real good reason_ to spend the time switching to a new
set of tools. Right now, I'm not in a hurry.)

So far, "cruising the Web" and looking at pictures of comets hitting
Jupiter or coffeepots about to boil just doesn't cut it. (I get CNN,
so I see all the comet hits I need, at higher resolution. Like porno
images which are sharper, cheaper, and better in magazines, I just
don't "get" the idea of surfing the Net or Web for images.) 

I'm a text/idea person, as you may have noticed, and the Web is no
substitute for either mailing lists or newsgroups. [And anticipating
more helpful comments, I understand that some folks use Mosaic,
MacWeb, etc., as newsreaders and mailers. Again, I see enough problems
and gotchas being debated to make me want to wait...maybe NetScape 1.1
will be my reason to convert.]

If I'm ranting, I apologize. I'm not angry at any one person, just at
the whole confusing mess it is all becoming. A zillion variants of
PGP, front-ends, shells, etc. A mail system that is rapidly losing its
"lingua franca" status (how ironic that I can't read the mail sent to
me by some French conference organizers, except circuitously). 

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.)

There's got to be a better way.

--Tim May





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[...]

   There's got to be a better way.
Tim's rant is one of the best illustrations of the effects of
transaction costs I've seen recently. Tim's story perfectly
illustrates the reason why the computer software industry doesn't move
faster. TYLISUM -- Ten Years Later I Still Use Microsoft.
The costs here are the of transaction of switching software systems.
In order to understand exactly what the transaction cost is, we posit
two worlds with respect to, say, email handling.
World 1: The status quo. Adequate capability. Zero marginal
benefit. This is the baseline we'll use to see if we can make an
improvement.

  World 2: The amazing world of MIMEzine, the mail reader that sucks
out your brain into the computer.  A $500 value, but available to you
at no charge from your friendly ftp site!

Note that there is no monetary exchange in either of these worlds.  I
want to make it perfectly clear that transaction costs are usually
non-monetary, even though they are, in a strict sense, paid.  In
standard bad old economic analysis, the mail reader is a good
(i.e. worth something) that is available for no cost, and so clearly
would be used by everybody, because it's in everybody's best interest
to do so.  As Coase pointed out, not so fast.

In order to accurately assess the economic effect of this transaction,
you have to look at the whole thing, from start to finish.  Here is a
not so outlandish sequence.  Some of the following costs can be shared
between multiple transactions, some can't.
1. Which friendly ftp site has MIMEzine? Make an archie query.
Cost: time to make an archie query
2. How do I use archie? Find out by reading the documentation.
Cost: time to read documentation and figure out how you'd
  actually use it.

3.  How can I possibly find out what ftp site has the file?  Have
someone tell you Use archie.

  Cost: time to ask your computer friends, which you've spent a long
time cultivating. [See note below on this topic.]
Alternate Cost: $25-$40 for one of those internet books.
4. Download MIMEzine using ftp.
Cost: see above for archie, and analogize.
5. Compile MIMEzine for Unix. (Binary distributions need not apply.)
Cost: Ever ported?
6. Learn how to use MIMEzine.
Cost: time to read manual. time to correct screwups created by
inadvertent use of your previous mailreader's keyboard bindings.  time
spent hunting for instruction on how to set up "proactive filter
mocking", which you just have to use.

7.  Customize MIMEzine for you own environment.

  Cost: time to learn what all the little configurations options do.
time to choose a place in the directory structure.  time to twiddle
until you've got it just right.
8. With probability p=3/4, decide that you absolutely can't stand
MIMEzine because of some braindead misfeature that makes you less
productive or because it's not really compatible with everything else
you're using.

  Cost: multiple all the preceding costs by 4=1/(1-p) to reflect that
you keep trying packages until you find one you like.  In my own
experience, I think a multiplier of 4 is on the low side.  

9.  The benefits of using MIMEzine!

  Benefit: Savings of an hour or so a week handling your email.
Increased ability to handle content types you're not really interested
in.
Transaction costs are _all_ of the costs above, since, of course, the
package is free, or rather, free(?). To summarize:
World 1: The status quo. Often acceptable.
World 2: The new technology. Frequently an extreme time sink for what
you get out of it, even if it's free software.

Is it any wonder that software progresses slowly?

A note on friendship networks.  The need to have a network of friends
that you use to find out about computer stuff is an indicator of
serious lack of scalability in the technical and social design of
computer systems.  Not everyone has time to cultivate a techie
network, and most people don't. This indicator is both a design
criterion and a test. One should design software so that it can be
used without needing to ask question, and one can guage success in
this by seeing the number of questions that are actually asked.
There is much more to be said about categorization of transaction
costs and what can be done to alleviate them. Later.
Eric