At 5:00 PM 9/9/93 -0700, Bill Janssen wrote:
use a format that gives you that control. Thanks to
ghostscript and ghostview, I have no problems with receiving messages
formatted with PostScript; thanks to XMosaic, I have no problems with
receiving messages formatted with HTML; thanks to CMU's Andrew Toolkit,
I have no problem with receiving messages formatted with ATK's various
object pickling formats.
The problem with that approach is that you lose the ability to control how
it looks on the screens of millions of users who do NOT have PS, HTML, or
Andrew interpreters. How it looks to them is "like a whole lot of junk".
And the real issue here is where the control belongs, not "I want control".
As a sender, I don't want my dox to be illegible on the reader's screen
because I chose a font he can't render well; on the other hand, I don't
want his goofy font with all sorts of funny glyphs to make my text
illegible, either. As a reader, I don't want to have to put up with
someone WHO INSISTS ON TYPING IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS ALL THE TIME FOR NO
DISCRENABLE REASON, but I also don't want to miss LEGITIMATE emphasis.
There ARE issues here. (Though whether we can solve them in text/enriched
is itself one of the issues.)
--
Steve Dorner, Qualcomm Inc.