Colored Backgrounds

[David Gaskill]

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 23:47:47 +1100, Michael Lightfoot wrote:

>On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 12:24:04, David Gaskill wrote:
>
>>What's wrong with HTML e-mail anyway? 
>>
>Wastes bandwidth, 

Never quite understood this "wasted bandwidth" thing. What dreadful fate will come 
upon us if we don't conserve  bandwidth? I have this vision of South Sea islanders 
issuing frantic appeals to the world to make a e-mails more concise in order to check 
the rise in sea levels ... On the other hand if you are referring to transmission delay 
see below. 

>CPU and diskspace 

I doubt whether reading HTML e-mail causes the processor much distress ; I haven't 
noticed any steam coming off mine when reading such e-mail. As for  disk space; 
multi-gig drives are now so cheap and commonplace that I would suggest that even if 
all the e-mail you received was in HTML format the percentage of your disk that it 
would occupy the be totally insignificant. 

>without adding more than very marginally to information content.

I think that's a bit sweeping. If I wish to send a client a properly formatted document 
to make it easy to read I may well use different fonts, different colours, tables etc. 
This is obviously not possible in ASCII.. I would normally prepare such a document in 
Word and attach it to the e-mail. Such an attachment is of course far bigger than an 
HTML format e-mail which in most cases could present the information in an  
understandable format. Why don't I do this? Doesn't look as pretty as the Word 
document and I want my client to be happy. 

Oh dear, there I go again, wasting bandwidth ... 

>>I have seen suggestions that if it is widely adopted the Internet will grind to a halt; 
>>HTML e-mail is becoming ever more common and the net is speeding up. 
>>
>Where?  Can I join that part of the net?

When I don't know about you but may be your ISP could. It is difficult to devise an 
objective measurement of the "speed of the Internet" but those that have tried 
conclude that in spite of the very steeply rising demand performance is improving. 
There is no doubt that a lot depends upon your ISP and the connectivity that he has 
around the globe. 

My provider offers an excellent service in this respect and I would suggest that you 
tried his services if I didn't think that the telephone calls to the UK might make it 
somewhat uneconomic ... 

>>Can't help wondering if those that carried messages in  forked sticks regarded the 
>>introduction of illuminated manuscripts as entirely unnecessary and burnt all 
>>communications received in this format....
>>
>Not many messages were _ever_ transmitted via illuminated manuscripts. 
>For a start most people couldn't wait for the several hours it took the
>monk to prepare each paragraph.  Some beautiful, but mostly unread
>bibles were prepare this way, not much else. Sort of useful as a
>parable for the net. 

Actually some degree of embellishment of documents concerning trade and 
commerce  was commonplace presumably for the same sort of reason that I prepare  
documents in Word - so yes, there is a parallel here to e-commerce.  

>How many of us have given up trying to view
>someone's Website after waiting _minutes_ for the home page to load,
>with all it's GIFs, frames, buggy javascript and finally java
>application producing a really boring little animation.

I think we must frequent different Web sites or maybe the problem lies with your 
ISP. 

In general  the designer of any business Web site will attempt to make the home page 
load as fast as possible for exactly the reasons you suggest. Of course there are 
exceptions to this and in these cases the designers must presumably believe that the 
impact produced by the lovely flash animations or whatever more than compensate 
for those that get bored and go away .  

>I'll stick to message sticks thank you very much.

OK, that's fine - most of the time I do the same thing but, for reasons I have tried to 
explain that, I see no reason to ignore or castigate others that embellish their 
communications with HTML.





David