On Wed, 17 Jun 2020, Tomasz Rola via cctalk wrote: Those few lines of text might only be human-readable after OCR processing. <rant> College administrators: At the college, we had one administrator who insisted that compliance with the state mandates for community college curricula of "computer literacy" and "information competency" were already met. He wrote a two line memo announcing a room change for a meeting. He did it in a "feature rich" word processor, then he printed it on a color printer, then he scanned that piece of paper, and then he attached that scanned graphic image to an email with SUBJECT: "For your information", and message text of "See the attachment". He vetoed my proposal to create a beginning course in Information Science, on the grounds that one of the local universities taught something that he considered to be the same, as a GRADUATE course, and "therefore, it would be ILLEGAL for the community college to teach it." One of our COBOL teachers got a gig at one of the local universities, and COPIED OUR COBOL class (the authors of the textbook, Jack Olson and Wil Price, were in our faculty) to be taught in the graduate school there. Our administrator said that it would be ILLEGAL for us to continue teaching it! </rant> -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 9:47 AM geneb via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I don't mean to point at anyone on this thread. I'm not good at seeing who is serious or sarcastic in this thread, and I really don't care, because this This conversation has come up again and again and gotten stale. It fundamentally amounts to a few people asserting "There is nothing worth saying that can't be said with the 25 letters of the English alphabet, so therefore the list should only include text that I can't read on a teletype". I say enough. We live in a remarkable world where it is possible to share knowledge and experiences with people from all over the world. Some of them might be disruptive enough to have things like ASCII-inconvenient accented characters in their names. I would like to be able to spell my friends and colleagues' names correctly. And sometimes, a picture really is worth 1000 words. A tiny SVG diagram in the middle of a description can do wonders. Did your physics textbook pull all the diagrams out to an appendix, just leaving a reference in the text? No it didn't. That would have been inconvenient and unnecessary. Except for those who choose otherwise, we all have the capability to view mail that presents like any other printed matter. It's time to adopt a platform that can handle modern mail. Some may still choose a degraded experience, but everyone is entitled to their own fetish.

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 10:28:05PM -0400, Tony Aiuto via cctalk wrote: [...] But pictures also consume magnitudes-of-order more resources than a thousand words, and should be used rather more judiciously than they are. My physics textbooks had editors who ensured that the text made sense and the images were useful to the reader. I'm sorry if you went to a bad school where your physics textbooks were similar to the vast majority of email. Any old mail client can read "modern mail": MIME is designed to be backwards-compatible and the text parts readable on non-MIME clients. One quickly learns the ASCII renderings of important non-ASCII characters after using such a client for a while. (How do I know this? I still use trn, which doesn't understand character sets at all. There are *no* "modern" newsreaders, apart from the occasional kitchen-sink monstrosity which does nothing well.) The "no attachments" rule on many mailing lists is not a Luddite thing, but a quality filter. There is a strong inverse correlation between those who feel that they can't communicate without images and fancy text formatting, and those who have something useful or interesting to say. Less is more, and all that. Images and HTML formatting also present an accessibility problem. At least one of the posters to this list gives a few "tells" in the way they write which suggest they are blind. Good luck doing text-to-speech on a JPEG.

On Fri, 19 Jun 2020, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote: I guess depending on how you define "modern". For instance (AL)PINE does handle UTF-8 (your UI might not however, if you run say on a VT220), which fulfils my definition of modernity, and it happens to have handled NNTP as well, since time immemorial. I have stopped participating with Usenet due to the lack of NNTP servers I could access, but I used to use PINE in this manner for years, and it did the right thing there. I continue using ALPINE for e-mail and I'm quite happy with the stuff it keeps away from me. An occasional PDF attachment I can deal with. And I can pipe a Git commit being read directly to `git am' with no fuss and no need to bother if it has been encoded in any way for transport. Sure, there's always `uuencode' when you do need to post that non-text piece (which I guess will keep the eyes of Luddites away from it too). Maciej

On Fri, 19 Jun 2020, Patrick Finnegan via cctalk wrote: Well, not everyone can afford to host their own site, for various reasons, and if hosting externally you have to agree to T&C's you may not necessarily be happy about. Maciej