Colored Backgrounds

[David Gaskill]

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 15:31:10 -0400 (AST), Trevor Smith wrote:

>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.

I rather doubt if the "community" to which you refer exist any more. For the moment at 
any rate Microsoft at rules whether or not we think it is OK. 

>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.

I regularly send it e-mail so with a attachments of a few hundred K , (OK, so you try to 
trying to teach your clients to use FTP ...), and I strongly suspect that the bandwidth 
consumed by attachments vastly exceeds that consumed by the HTML overhead. 

>>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.

Not sure about that. Hygiene would probably be adequately served if I only had five 
centimetres of water in my bath but there's no shortage of water so why shouldn't I have 
a good wallow ... 

>>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.

I am sure you are right. The net is a very efficient marketplace. 

>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.

I (reluctantly) left OS/2 before Flash was around but I gather from what you say that it is 
not available for that platform. I have to say that when it is used intelligently in an 
appropriate situation it can be very effective. If it was driving people away from Web sites 
in droves Macromedia wouldn't be making lots of money selling it. 

David