🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <brsmith.726781396@duncan> brsmith@duncan.cs.umn.edu (Brian R. Smith) writes:
>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, ...

But if you're reading news, you've got a computer *somewhere*!  :-)
MIME means more than graphics and sound, and yes, you'll lose graphics
and sound posted in news messages.  MIME also means (relatively) painless
retrieval of publically available files, completely painless transmission
of binaries, smooth handling of digests, and reasonable handling of non-
7-bit-ASCII characters, even when passing through 7-bit and EBCDIC systems.
Surely users of dumb terminals can benefit from at least a few of these?

My point about MS-DOS, before, was that from a MIME perspective, a straight,
non-Windows MS-DOS computer isn't much better than a dumb terminal.  (No
wise-cracks, please!)  Nevertheless, MIME is quite useful for the above
purposes.  It's not going to do nifty graphics and sound, but the users
here will sure be happy when they can send and receive binary enclosures
in a standard way, and the ones who use languages other than English will
appreciate having e-mail that doesn't dictate the language used.

I agree with your point about printing terminals, 300 baud, and so on.
Dumb terminals certainly cannot take advantage of all MIME has to offer.
The world is moving ahead, though, and just as we've all grown past designing
text editors with ASR-33's in mind, we have to start designing e-mail
software with sophisticated user interfaces in mind.

-- 
Stephen Trier                      "We want to offer you a price that you
Network software type               just can't afford to take advantage of."
Case Western Reserve University         - Sales blurb from HSC Software
trier@ins.cwru.edu