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Please, no drawings (was: Pulleys (Spanish rig?))



Leigh Palmer wrote:


This leads me to ask a question, perhaps of Dan. Will it be
possible to include very small drawings (say 64 kilobytes
or less) in postings to phys-l sometime in the near future?
They can be pasted right into the text in mail programs
like the free version of Eudora 5.0. It sure would be
helpful to be able to do so.

I, for one, hope not. Some reasons:

1a. Not everyone can read HTML mail, even though a crippled version of
Eudora is available on the web for free at Qualcomm's site.

1b. People who can't read HTML mail often get a pesky string of
incomprehensible binary characters 64 kilobytes long (if that's the
size of the graphic) attached to their emails in place of the image.

2. People who can read HTML mail sometimes don't want to (i.e., they
disable the capability) because of the risk of "web bugs" (small
"personalized" image files) that spammers sometimes embed in HTML
messages to report back to them whether the recipient actually exists.

3a. Transmitting images via mass email (listservs) chews up bandwidth
and increases download time (I get 75 to 100 emails daily over a 28K
modem, so a few 64kB files would add more than just a few seconds to
the download). Yes, I'll be getting DSL when I can, but I'm 18000 feet
from the telco and their service limit is 17.5k-ft (ack!).

3b. Once you open this genie's bottle, will 64k be enough? Will we
soon be getting full-page blow-ups (pun intended) of exploding Pyrex?

4. A reasonable and time-tested alternative exists; namely, posting
the images and providing URLs in the message. Use John D as your
model.

I hope I didn't burst anyone's bubble, but no one else has posted the
disadvantages.

--MB