HTML Mail for PHYS-L: Pros/Cons

[Doug Craigen <dcc@ESCAPE.CA>]

Rick Tarara wrote:
> Are you still using a Mac Classic and 9600 baud modem?  Sometime (in fact
> often) newer IS better.  How many here would really like to take their
> family for a cross the country drive in a '55 Chevy?   I for one use the
> newer features of Office 2000.   We COULD include equations in our listserve
> messages and small line drawings.  We don't for a variety of reasons, but it
> shouldn't be because 'the old way was good enough for grandpa so it's good
> enough for me'.

Its a question of at what point the advantages outweigh the
disadvantages.  Bill Beaty's sugestion of a server-inforced small size
limit would help insure that attachments be used only for such things as
equations and small line drawings, and this would eliminate some abuse
of the system.  It does present a few unpleasant scenarios though, such
as taking all the time to write a message complete with equations and
sketches and then have it either bounced back to be reworked or sent
through in some incomplete or mangled form.  Unless we either have mail
editors that report the size of a message prior to sending, or the
message size limit is fairly high (such as Bill's 40 k) this could
become a common scenario.

Bill also asked who is really the one who is out of date?  Is it the one
who wants to keep PHYS-L running as efficiently as possible and
therefore makes up web pages for anything involving graphics or
equations and provides an URL, or is it the one who wants to make
reading and writing as easy as possible by keeping everything together
in the message?  There is a curious hybrid possible here where if PHYS-L
didn't mangle HTML mail I could provide inline images without sending
them through the PHYS-L server.  I simply place the image on a website
and make the image "src" point there.  This is how most e-zines I
receive do it.  This would certainly permit me to send everybody that
500 kB image that I think they need to see without abusing
lists.nau.edu, but is it another form of abuse?  In particular, if I
include images this way (big or small), it allows me to monitor who
reads my message and when via my server logs.  As an example, I could
look and see that somebody from sprynet.com read my message at some
time, and note that your response to it arrived at the PHYS-L server one
minute later.  I could reasonably infer that the sprynet user was you
and write back "why don't you take the time to carefully read what I
really said...".  I could even set cookies if I wanted to, create pop-up
windows etc.  It seems to me that various forms of potential abuse or
privacy invasion via PHYS-L should be considered.

Finally, there is the matter of how many subscribers would be
alienated.  One could say that anybody who can't read HTML mail won't
miss anything that they are presently getting. So long as HTML mail is
only used when sending images this would be true.  Is this what would
happen?  Aside from not seeing the images, how many problems does HTML
mail present to some people, and how many people is that?  Whenever
technology changes are made, at some level a decision is made that for
the benefit of x% of the users, we will make a change than may cause us
to annoy and even lose 100-x% of the users.  Usually "x" is left as some
undetermined number such as "most of us", but it is possible to quantify
this by polling the list.  The "democratic way" would suggest making the
change as soon as x>50%, but the community centered way waits longer.
What kind of community are we?  How large/small of a minority will we
respect rather than lose?

\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\_/^\

Doug Craigen
          http://www.dctech.com/physics/about_dc.html