🚀 go-pugleaf

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)?
--
====================================================================
David Masterson					Consilium, Inc.
(415) 691-6311					640 Clyde Ct.
davidm@consilium.com				Mtn. View, CA  94043
====================================================================
"Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation to which the filing system
 has been lost?"
-- Quentin Crisp

Thank you to all who responded to my questions about MIME smart news readers.
Several of you told me that the current version (v2.4) of MetaMail has patches
for TRN (Threaded News Reader) included.  Sure enough the mailers.txt file
contained these.  I ftp'd v2.4 of TRN, applied the patches and read my own
post.  Still a few things to work out though.

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.  I use a dumb terminal and 1200 baud
modem to read most of my mail and news.  The RichText should work just fine
on any terminal with a half decent termcap.  Is RichText readable without a
RichText viewer?  You tell me I my last post was RichText, I think you can see 
what I said.

-- 
Vance Shipley 
vances@xenitec.on.ca         vances@switchview.com         vances@ltg.uucp

In article <DAVIDM.93Jan10225930@consilium.com> davidm@consilium.com (David S. Masterson) writes:
>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)?

Well, what's the problem with a dialup?  If you have a decent terminal,
your newsreader will display richtext formatted for the terminal.  There's
nothing that says you need a windowing system to use MIME and richtext.
(At least I hope there isn't, since we've been using it on MS-DOS.)

Minimum-level richtext processing can just do word wrap and strip the other
formatting codes.  Obviously, doing some sort of bold/underline/centering
is really nice, but you could read richtext, in its strip-the-codes form,
on an ADM-3A.

Of course, there's also the issue of human readability.  You can read rich-
text, even without stripping the codes.  It's not the greatest, but it's also
not illegible.  Keep in mind that most letters/articles don't use too much
fancy formatting, so there won't be too many richtext codes for your brain
to process.

-- 
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

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