Re: HTML better for small PDAs

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001 15:53:56 EST, Doug Sauder <doug(_at_)broadsoft(_dot_)com>  
said:

> I read the entire XML-SOAP document on my PDA, and that convinced me
> that reading documents on a small device is doable.  I would be happy to
> put lots of RFCs and I-Ds on my PDA and have them available even when I
> don't have a laptop around.  However, plain ASCII text, like the RFCs,
> looks pretty bad on a small device, because the paragraphs don't wrap
> in a pleasing way.  HTML looks a lot better on a PDA than plain ASCII.
Ironically enough, the previous paragraph arrived as one long string
without a 'format=flowed'.  As a result, it didn't wrap in a pleasing way. ;)

Of course, the concept that we should redo all the RFCs into XML so they are
more pleasing on a GameBoy-class display misses the point that rfc1.txt is
still readable 32 years after being written, while both the XML and the
display you're trying to support will probably be history within a decade.

Trivia Question 1:  What was the *first* popular word-processing program
that used embedded codes, etc, in addition to flat ascii, on a PC/Apple/etc
machine?

Trivia Question 2:  What year was it released?

Trivia Question 3:  If you were handed a file in that format, could you read it?


-- 
                                Valdis Kletnieks
                                Operating Systems Analyst
                                Virginia Tech

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