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On Wed, 12 Apr 1995, Stan Jones wrote:

> >Just curious.  As most email gateways to the net will only accept ascii, or
> >uucoded attachments (which require aditional hassle to decode), don't you
> >think you'll encounter technological obstacles to distribution if you make
> >the email anything other then ascii text?
> >
> >Hank LeMieux
> >Arlington, VA
> >
> HTML documents are plain text and can be e-mailed. I don't know about
> Acrobat documents yet -- does anyone on the list have an answer to this?
> 
	Acrobat files are ASCII-encoded binary data that's interpreted on 
the fly by the reader. You can open them up with Notepad or Edit, in 
other words, but except for some English coding tags at the beginning 
they're wall-to-wall Martian.
	BTW, I don't understand the implication in this thread that
mailing encoded binaries is too esoteric an application to be used by a
genera-circulation publication. Eudora, Pine, cc:Mail, Notes Mail and most
other mainstream mail agents handle attachments more or less seamlessly.
	I don't think we're exactly riding the crest of the wave if we're
trying to woo customers with a Courier-type-on-a-black-screen product.
This great idea --

> If we send HTML documents as email [...] 
> when people open such documents with a Web browser, they look and
> act pretty much like a page opened over the Web. The benefit to a newspaper
> publisher, if this works, is that he can presumably deliver thousands of
> copies by email during the night, rather than having to build a Web server
> that can handle, say, 100,000 hits between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. if, say,
> 20,000 readers want an average of 5 pages apiece every morning.

-- would be a lot greater for both reader (in response time) and publisher
(in lighter server load) if the _images_ could be delivered that way.
Unfortunately, although most mailers may be able to handle binary
attachments, they handle them in different ways, whereas the "IMG SRC"es
would have to be in the same relative position on each reader's machine
for the HTML to work. 
	(Maybe give your subscribers a setup disk with a preconfigured mail
agent that automatically detaches binaries into the same subdirectory or
folder, then write your HTML accordingly? And remind him every so often 
to clean out the old images before his disk overflows?)

	Gordy
--
Gordon T. Thompson                                        gordy@nytimes.com
Manager, Internet Services                                212-556-1386    
The New York Times                                        fax: 212-556-1636
   The Times and I have an arrangement: Neither of us speaks for the other.



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