To: Stan Jones 
Cc: online-news@marketplace.com
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Sorry about yet one more post.  I'm enjoying this thread.

On Wed, 12 Apr 1995, Stan Jones wrote:

[quoted comments deleted]

> If we sent HTML documents, anyone with a Web browser, such as Mosaic or
> Netscape, could read these email files. Many people have such browsers
> already and of course they're available for free to anyone who wants one.
> So the do-you-have-a-reader problem would seem to be no more difficult, and
> perhaps easier, with HTML documents than with any likely graphical
> alternative.

If you use a PC without Windows (286s and some 386s can't run Windows), you
can't use any of the existing graphical browsers, AFAIK.

You face two new challenges here:

1) Your documents, assuming graphics, will be huge.  At many sites, they 
will arrive split into smaller pieces (AOL, I think, is one example); 
this means that specific graphics will arrive split up, not merely that 
the graphics will be separated from the text.  Many people have to 
manually put them back together; many don't know how to do this at all.

2) The only way I can see to do this reasonably would be to archive the 
entire publication, graphics, text (in html), even sound bites (which 
might be a really cool idea) into a single file.  Your readers would have 
to download the file into a single directory in order for the links 
between pages, text and graphics to function.

The second challenge is easily surmounted; you'd need a PKZipped version 
for PC users, a stuffitted/binhexed version for Macs and a tar.Z for unix;
three mailing lists would accomplish this easily and automatically.

The first problem will cause insurmountable trouble for a subset of your 
readers.

The advantage of plain ol' e-text is that if it arrives splut into 
pieces, it won't matter.

Of course, if you can do both, you've licked the problem, and coincidentally
done yeoperson's work at serving your customers well.


Jay Linden                                           Phone: (416) 510-8948
Toronto, Canada                                  Fax/Modem: (416) 510-8949
Net Presence/Marketing/Netsurfing        email: jjlinden@gold.interlog.com
     


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