From: jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind)
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 22:35:45 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: I Like ASCII, not MIME and Other Fancy Crap
Message-ID: <aaf34c0004021004ba1b@[132.162.201.201]>
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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.)