Subject: Re: Emailing the news From: jjlinden@gold.interlog.com (Jay Linden) Date: Sun, 16 Apr 1995 19:46:42 -0400

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Still playing catch-up.  Sorry.

At 07:41 PM 4/12/95 -0400, Gordy Thompson wrote:
>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.

That's true, but they're also very, very large files.  While the size can
be controlled somewhat by using smaller graphics files and making very
careful use of fonts, the size and time for downloading them is still
going to shock users with slow modems and small hard drives.

>	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.

I think that if we have to prioritize something here, it should be
content.  I like style, graphics, layout and font selection as much as
the next guy.  But when I look at a newspaper, my primary purpose is to
be informed.  If I have to choose, I want the pictures to add 
significantly to the information value, not the "style" value, of the
paper.

Personally, I don't have a problem with large e-mailed documents, even
though my hard drive is cramped enough that I'd almost certainly have to
be very, very careful.  But I'd probably end up reading the text on the
shell and downloading the binaries (pictures) one at a time, as space
permitted, thus largely defeating the purpose of all that layout work.

Put the publication on a website and it's a whole 'nother story.

But that's me.  Your mileage almost certainly will vary.

>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?)

Now this bothers me a bit.  While it would work for many, it's beginning
to sound like a dozen different publications sending editions with a
dozen different readers.  How long, for example, does it take for the
consumer's disk to overflow?  Mine has about 11MB of free space right now.
The company pentium still has over half a GB left.  Three days of a
highly graphical download, whether html, pdf or whatever, will crash my
system.

Why not K.I.S.S. ("keep it simple, stupid").  Offer it in email as text
(possibly with a few small attached GIFs).  Put it on the web as html or
pdf.  Those of us with disk space and Acrobat can access it that way.


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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