Colored Backgrounds

[Trevor Smith]

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 16:22:41, David Gaskill wrote:

>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. 

That depends on what program is making the HTML. I read an article
recently (in Computing Canada) which complained about Word 2000
(IIRC) and its penchant for adding kilobytes to HTML docs. A basic
HTML page, the article explained, is a few bytes long (63 bytes if
you include the text "Hello World") since it has very few required
tags. The same file saved with Word 2000 was > 2,000 bytes because of
redundant HTML tags and useless meta tags.

If the community agrees to a standard, if applications produce
efficient HTML and stick to that standard, fill your boots. Send me
all the HTML email you want. I won't use HTML in my email much, but
bandwidth isn't that dear these days that I will care much if you do.

But if you're going to send me crap produced by ridiculously
inefficient editors, please don't bother. If you really don't believe
that an extra few KB here and there makes any difference, you clearly
don't know how many people are sending email these days.

>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. 

True and some day bandwidth will be at a point where email -- even MS
Word documents sent as email -- will be a negligible part of the
overall traffic. Some day we'll all be video conferencing over the
'net. But right now, we're not.

Even when we do get there, just because you have lots of something
doesn't mean it's wise to squander it. Efficiency is better.

>>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. 

Don't make the mistake of thinking that your experiences on the 'net
are the norm. I, for example, sometimes *still* encounter the
situation described above and I live in Canada, where we have one of
the best communications infrastructures in the world (I have a cable
modem maxing out at ~5mbps, btw). And I *do* give up and go elsewhere
when some idiot loads his page down with garbage. But everyone's
tolerance level is different and some may have "fast enough"
connections for all their WWW viewing. Shrug.

>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 

You'd think so but I am not so sure. Many large commercial site
designers don't seem to get it, IMO. But I generally stop frequenting
their site so maybe, if others behave like me, they may get it sooner
or later.

>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 .  

God I hate Flash and other silly things like that. I went to the
Whistler (Whistler - Blackcomb is a large ski resort in BC, Canada)
web site the other day to find out when the season opened and how
much lift tickets were. The damn site was FLASH ONLY! They happened
to have the opening date on the front page but I was out of luck for
the other info. Needless to say, I haven't been back to the site.

Regardless of all the above, I don't really care much about HTML
email as long as it's efficient.


-- 
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 Trevor Smith          | We've got a blind date with destiny,
 trevor@haligonian.com | and it looks like she's ordered
 www.haligonian.com    | the lobster.         - The Shoveler
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