From: "Pat Farrell" <pfarrell@netcom.com>
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 94 08:52:38 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
Message-ID: <42504.pfarrell@netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Zero crypto content....

  tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)  writes:
> 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.

The better way is the spontantous order that markets generate. We are too
early in the cycle to have figured out that having a standard 2 by 4
is better than cutting boards to custom sizes for each job.

But some of this is self inflicted by the folks on this list, and other
serious netheads. The vast majority of the world's populations would have
no idea what Tim is ranting about. The last figure I saw had the percentage
of home computers in the US with modems at 14%, but only 4% had accounts
at a service provider of any type.  The folks on this list are on the
leading edge, and are exposed to more of the leading edge, failure prone
experiments. MIME's encryption of ASCII so it is unreadible is just an
example of a false start.

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.

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
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,
something that takes time and effort and concentration. Interestingly, the
net is a fairly weak place to learn typography, as it is impossible to see
what is meant by "color" of a page of text unless it is properly typeset,
which requires the fonts, kerning, leading, etc... so get a book :-)

Pat

Pat Farrell      Grad Student                 pfarrell@cs.gmu.edu
Department of Computer Science    George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
Public key availble via finger          #include <standard.disclaimer>