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by Smiley (13Mar00) |
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The Internet started with UseNet Newsgroups and private e-mail over a decade before
the concept of websites made it a household word. Today, several monsterous evolutions
later, we still have an enormous population of internauts that use the tools they've
always used to navigate newsgroup publications and private e-mail. Why do they use
"outdated" tools? Because those tools serve the function of information
exchange and since they work fine, there's less need to relearn the wheel then there
is to chase after much more pressing issues confronting them on a daily basis. All
of these are forms of communication to which purpose (the mutual exchange of information)
these tools are deployed and anything that detracts from that purpose, well, detracts
from that purpose! :-) HTML encoded e-mail is a distraction and waste of resources, at best. At worst, it stops communication which is the PURPOSE of the e-mail message. Nigel already pointed out that the information you'd like to exchange with someone that could be done in a 0.037KB plain text file when encoded in HTML requires 1.5KB. I can hear Jones now, "Bah, hard drive storage is cheap, 1.5KB ain't squat! It's time for you guys to move into the 18th Century. Bunch of whiners." And he's got a point. But so do I. Resources can be devoted to a lot of things, and I believe that there are more important purposes to point those resources than feeding the voracious maw of the WIntel machine. Let's take your little 1.5KB message and multiply it by the 1.7 million subscribers that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) services and then multiply that by the 30 messages per day that each of those users sends/receives on the average. Now, take that 76,500,000KB and stuff it into a 1.45Kb/s T1 pipe and stash it on a Level5 RAID array in a mail server that is backed up to a backup server in real time. 73GB per day my small little (pretend) ISP is handling, and those 1.7 million users only represent about 4% of all the users on the Internet today. Now we're talking about some pretty serious resources being devoted to your ability to send dancing elmo's out in your e-mail messages. The above is the BEST CASE scenario, the worst case scenario is that the person to whom you're sending "elmo" deletes your message without even reading it and is left with the impression that you're too ignorant to bother with. HTML encoding has a very important place on the Internet, web pages. Leave it out of e-mail and we can deploy our resources on more important issues like how to get enough copper in the ground to give everyone a DS3 into their basement. |
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