Colored Backgrounds

[David Gaskill]

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999 16:16:07 -0800, Steve Lamb wrote:

>Saturday, December 11, 1999, 8:22:41 AM, David wrote:
>> Never quite understood this "wasted bandwidth" thing.
>
>    Imagine getting 600 messages a day (I do) and having the volume of that
>mail doubled from 2Mb to 5-6Mb.  Now imagine downloading that on a 56k 
modem.
>It just went from 15 minutes to ~45 minutes.  That is wasted bandwidth.

Steve, 

Thought it might be worthwhile checking some of these assumptions about the 
size inflation caused by sending HTML e-mail. 

The size of your posting to the list to which I am replying is 9 K. I forwarded 
this message to myself changing the format to HTML, changing a few colours 
and  italicising a few words - the the sort of thing I might do if I was sending an 
e-mail in this format. The size went up to 11 K. 

I then went berserk changing fonts, colours, sizes, text type etc till it looked like 
the dog had been sick on it. The size went up to 20 K. 

I then pasted the thing into Word and made it look nice. The file size was 38 K. 

Lastly I took an e-mail I had received in HTML format and forwarded it to 
myself with the HTML formatting removed. The size fell from 7 K to 5.5 K 

No doubt if I had been able to add coloured backgrounds or pictures the 
HTML inflation would have been greater but PMmail does not permit this and I 
couldn't be bothered to do it in Outlook  Express. 

It would seem that if everybody using e-mail changed to HTML format traffic 
would rise, at the out side, by 50 per cent and the amount of space used for 
storing mail on my hard drive, (excluding attachments), would rise by a similar 
amount. 

I think the volume of e-mail traffic on the net  is doubling approximately every 
four months so I would suggest that the likely impact of HTML mail on the 
operation on the Internet will hardly be perceptible. 

>    What about your ISPs mail server that has to handle a few thousand to a
>few million of those a day.  Now multiply the volume by 2-3.

You will understand, though not I think sympathise, when I say that this is his 
problem. The relatively small about of expenditure necessary to provide the 
extra storage capacity that would be necessary in the unlikely event of 
everybody switching to HTML e-mail is not going to make much of a dent in 
his healthy profits. 

>>>without adding more than very marginally to information content.
>
>> I think that's a bit sweeping.
>
>    No, it is not.
>
>> 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..
>
>    Tell all the authors who write how many books in simple black text on an
>off-white background.  It is possible in simple ASCII, it has been for
>thousands of years.

Books are rarely sent by e-mail. Business plans, Project Proposals, Discussion 
Documents, conventionally use the whole range of formatting tools to present a 
readable and easily understood document. 

If I sent such a document to a client in ASCII rather than as a Word 
attachment, he would think I had come off my trolley. 

>> There is no doubt that a lot depends upon your ISP and the connectivity that
>> he has around the globe.
>
>    O-bing.  You're starting to think globally here.  Remember, up until
>recently some countries in the pacific, MAJOR countries, had a blazing fast
>connection of a *single* T-1.  Yes, that's for the whole country.  IIRC, that
>country was called "Australia."

I do a fair bit of business in Australia and have no problem with connection 
speeds. Maybe my entry into this market has spurred the Australians to install 
a second T-1 connection ... 

>> 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 ...
>
>    You're finally catching on.

This comment was intended humorously - failed again ... 

>> 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.
>
>    *cough*  Bullshit  *cough*
>
>    Tell that to all the designers that have Flash intros on their page.

I suppose we can only assume that such companies concerned are run by a 
bunch of morons who never look at their hit counters or care whether their 
Web site produces any business 

>    For reasons I have explained, there is.  You're only looking at your small
>plot of the 'net, your computer.  You're not scaling all of that up to the
>rest of the 'net as a whole.

I have enough on my plate without worrying about the Internet as a whole. 
When I switch another light on I do not worry about whether the generating 
company has sufficient capacity to supply this increased demand. 

My experience over the last few years has been that demand on the Internet 
have risen at a truly incredible rate; not only has supply kept pace but the 
performance of the whole system has improved. I have every  reason to think 
that this will continue to be the case whether or not I send HTML e-mail ... 

David