[Coco] Re: Document Formatting

[John E. Malmberg]

Stephen H. Fischer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I must say that I differ almost completely on everything that you have said.
> 
> You describe a world that I do not wish to live in. A picture that is in
> very many ways incorrect.

Yet you do not indicate any of those ways.  Which makes me think that 
you are reading something different than what I wrote, and need to read 
it again.


If you insist that e-mail/news programs be completely up to date, you 
should note that your e-mail/news client is not compliant with internet 
e-mail conventions because it did not automatically remove the portion 
of the subject on a reply in parenthesis indicating a change in subject. 
  There may even be an RFC describing the behavior if I cared enough to 
look up the exact reference.

But I will guess that most people are not aware of that convention.  I 
only found out about while looking up something else.  It's not like it 
is worth worrying about too much.

Other e-mail/news clients in use on this forum are not aware that they 
should not be including anything after the "-- " signature delimiter on 
replies.

These are not new conventions, they are long standing ones.

So there seems to be a lot of people just on this forum running out of 
date e-mail/news clients.  Should they all get rid of them?


I live in a world were I communicate with people by e-mail that use any 
sort of e-mail links, from amateur radio relays to pda handhelds, and 
that people run all sorts of computers.

Where people who are on fixed incomes that can not upgrade to the latest 
fad, or e-mail accounts with unlimited storage quotas.

Having 2 MB taken up of a 10M quota where a 80 byte URL would have been 
sufficient, does not seem to be progress.  Having it done with out the 
senders knowledge of what they did is also wrong.

Some of my friends are blind, and can only use audio based interfaces.

I use systems of what use to be high end workstations that are running 
1600 * 1280 resolution with greater than 150 dpi, but then discover that 
I can not view web pages composed on systems that know that computers 
maxed out at 800 * 600 resolution at 75 DPI, which seems to be quite a few.

I had an x86 based workstation that when running two different Microsoft 
Operating systems at the same resolution running the same version of 
Internet Explorer that picked two different replacement colors for the 
same web page.  In the case of the newer operating system, the 
replacement color was invisible on that page.

Is your solution that every one runs the exact same computer in the 
exact same configuration?  Just because the common composition software 
is ignorant of the standards it should be compliant with.

If I know that someone has an e-mail address, I know that they can 
accept a plain text message.  That is all that I know until they tell me 
otherwise.  So I make no assumptions of what they might or might not 
have, or how much storage that they have for messages.

I have no objections to someone sending any sort of MIME content to 
someone else that wants to receive it.

But it is wrong for a mail/news client vendor to let computer newbies 
think that MIME is compatible with all e-mail systems or to assume that 
it is a preferred mode of communications.  It is also wrong to criticize 
anyone that does not want to receive MIME content for what ever reasons 
that they have.

> That the Amish do not have computers prevents me from assuming that you are
> one.

How do you know what the Amish have?  To an outsider, they are not 
consistent in what they permit or do not permit.  Some sects are known 
to possess and use Cell phones for use in dealing with outsiders. 
Something must charge them.

-John
wb8tyw(at)qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only