🚀 go-pugleaf

In <1993Jan11.081251.19255@xenitec.on.ca> vances@xenitec.on.ca (Vance Shipley) writes:

>In article <DAVIDM.93Jan10225930@consilium.com> davidm@consilium.com (David S. Masterson) writes:
>>Since the talk has strayed into rich text in news reading, I'd like to ask
>>about all those people who read the news via dialups to a main system.  Rich
>>text is going to make it very hard for these people to read the news.  Is
>>anyone considering this (ie. is rich text still readable if you don't have a
>>rich text reader)?

>Dialup has nothing to do with it at all.

This is true enough.  I use a PowerBook with SLIP, telnet, and X server
via a dialup.  Multimedia news is not a problem.

What I think Mr. Masterson was referring to was people reading news via
dumb terminals/emulators/etc.  They're not going to have access to
graphics, sound, etc.  Even if RichText is readable on dumb terminals,
they won't *gain* anything from MIME additions to news, and, indeed,
they'll lose portions of articles that can't be displayed on dumb
terminals.

But, then, my response to that is: "So what?"  Folks with printing
terminals are inconvenienced by full-screen editors.  300 baud modems
aren't supported on many dialups nowdays either.  If dumb terminals are
finally dead (not yet, admittedly), I'll dance on their grave.  You have
to up the ante sooner or later...
--
Brian
brsmith@cs.umn.edu