16 Jun
2000
16 Jun
'00
7:24 p.m.
On June 16, Chuck McManis wrote:
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!
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.
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??
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
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. > 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. > 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. > 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.