From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 94 14:28:22 PST
To: perry@imsi.com
Subject: Re: McCoy is Right! New Mail Format to Start Now.
In-Reply-To: <9412152136.AA01440@snark.imsi.com>
Message-ID: <199412152227.OAA05100@netcom12.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


As Perry is actually making some points without sarcasm (*) and
without demonizing me as some Neanderthal bent on converting the list
to a 20-column, all caps past, I'll respond:

Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> The point, Tim, is that you keep conflating a bad MIME read that you
> happen to use with the notion that MIME is bad. MIME doesn't force its
> users to understand anything about formats, character sets or anything
> else. Your mail reader is whats doing that. If you were, say, using
> the Andrew Messaging System which now understands MIME, you could
> remain blissfully ignorant the whole time of how the underpinnings
> work.

Perhaps, but I don't have the Andrew Messaging System, nor do I expect
most of the subscribers here. I see lots of AOL, Compuserve, Portal,
Netcom, etc., accounts, and the range of mailers available to (most)
of them does not include the AMS or similar things.

I deeply resent--but will try not to take it personally, so no
animosity to Perry or Jim or others is intended--the insinuation
through sarcasm or through direct statements that I am hopelessly
wedded to a past of ASR-33 terminals and good old-fashioned
typewriters. Like a lot of folks here, I use stuff that's far beyond
simple ASCII. I think I've adequately covered this point.

Eric Hughes wrote a nice piece several weeks back about adoption of
new technology, new tools all being a matter of _return on
investment_. 

For example, I could spend some number of hours switching from my
current mail progam (elm) to some other editor which perhaps
better-supported the MIME messages seen here. But if all I got for
several hours of using, learning, and becoming comfortable with, say,
"pine," was the ability to see an _italicized_ word, or a word in
Cyrillic, then I would consider this a poor ROI.

And nobody has yet said there's anything worth doing this for in any
of the MIME messages I've yet seen. Sure, Amanda W. exercised the
process by including a GIF....a process which several people saw
errors with, and no doubt many others skipped completely.

Does this make me backward? No. It's all ROI. 

Like it or not, we are now in a mostly-ASCII Net environment. This
shows up when people fail to convert special characters (apostrophes,
left and right quotes, em dashes, bullets, etc.) into the "straight
ASCII" characters (such as ', ", --, *) that most of the rest of us
can display easily. People right complain about posts and messages
filled with "^H" and other oddball symbols.

(And it certainly doesn't mean that people like me don't have the
capability of displaying extended character sets....I clearly can,
given the right tools, effort, etc. Many can't, and many won't. The
"Display Postscript" standard was an attempt to bootstrap the world to
a new standard for document display, and it failed. Maybe the "Andrew
Message System" is another such fix. Maybe it's even better designed.
All well and good. But it ain't available to most of us. Nor would I
even install it if all I got was em dashes and the like displayed
correctly. ROI, again.)

Please don't characterize my views as Luddite wishes for a simpler
world. 

--Tim May









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