Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Thu, 31 Dec 1992 20:32:30 CST
From:         "Michael S. Hart" <HART@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
Subject:      Looking Back from 12/31/92

Comments from December 31, 1991        About Ideas From the Past


Contents

**Form Versus Content. . .The Eternal Battle is Finally Ending**

**"Drinking from a Firehose". . .I Dare You to Say that Again!**

**Easy Storage Versus Easy Access. . .Compression Versus ASCII**
"Send Them the Sourcecode". . .I Dare You, Too, Say that Again!*

**Moderators Should be Moderate. . .Should They Not?
"This Will Be the Last Posting on the Subject"

Part 1
**Form Versus Content. . .The Eternal Battle is Finally Ending**

Margination. . .Form Versus Content. . .We Have a New Winner and
the Winner is. . . . . . . . .the reader!

Can we really stay with incompatible forms of Desktop Publishing
programs that require expensive computers to see or print them??
In the short run we will stay with Plain Vanilla ASCII for email
and other things that must read a wide audience, but for narrow,
narrower, narrowest communications there may be an advantage for
using media other people won't be willing or able to read.

Paper printing has spent an inordinate amount of time and energy
on preparing manuscripts for publication in the matter of form a
page takes and on margins for those pages.

The amount of time and energy has been SO great that we take for
granted most of what we see on the printed page, except perhaps,
when it become ridiculously obvious in newspaper columns when it
happens that one line has twice as many letters as the following
line. . .a n d  t h e  p r i n t e r s  a d d  a  s p a c e  t o
each position in the line to justify the margination once more--
just as other professions go out of their way to justify similar
idiosyncracies of their own.

However, with electronic text there is no need for pages at all,
and using varied margins does not cost paper, the expense of the
paper is the idiosyncratic cause of the thousands of hyphens all
over the average book.  You are probably so used to it that your
mind skips over it, but take a look and you will find the margin
is justified at the expense of 10% of the lines being hyphenated
to accommodate the saving of perhaps 1 or 2% of the paper (If an
example page had 50 lines and it would cost an entire line. . .a
not terribly great prospect. . .then the book would be 2% longer
in pages to eliminate all the extra hyphenation; if the page for
the example contained 100 lines, then 1% more pages would do it.

Just as there is no need for pagination with scrolls or with the
electronic equivalent, so, too, there is no need for margination
. . .as the number of characters is the same to contain articles
with an average of 65 characters. . .whether the margins are all
the same, such as in this article, or whether half the lines are
75 characters and the other half are 55 characters, and none are
actually 65 characters.

For those of you who have wondered about my margination, I would
be easily willing to tell you half the reason for it. . .I would
write on early word processors that justified the margins with a
method similar to the newspaper example above, by the insertions
of spaces between words to create the justification.  You can do
this still with most word processors today, but at least most of
them will insert the spaces where you can see them (WYSIWYG. . .
What You See Is What You Get). . .but. . .there were no WYSIWYGs
back then, so I learned to write in manners that Let Me See What
I Was Going To Get. . .as I wanted to determine the phraseology,
not have the computer do it for me.

As far as _I_ am concerned, Desktop Publishing has focused quite
enough on fonts, form, margination, proportional spacing and the
antiquated 8 1/2 by 11 inch format. . .so much, in fact, that an
electronic text from Desktop Publishing output is so messy in an
Etext of the Plain Vanilla ASCII that it is often pretty useless
unless presented in the Desktop Publishing program.

The second reason has to do with the 81 pages of rules about the
FORM of my thesis, including margination right to left, top from
bottom, and much, much, much more.

At any rate, electronic texts will eliminate the needs for pages
and margins to be regulated. . .although people will continue to
regulate them for years to come, and programs will allow authors
of theses and other works to write while thinking only about the
CONTENT of what they write, and then translate it into the FORMs
required by this officialdom or that one with ease.  In the past
it used to be a major requirement that the authors spend totally
inordinate amounts of time or money. . .or both. . .on "Payments
of Dues" proving they were really interested enough in admission
to the cliques of those who had already done so.

Why is form prevalent over content?  Because those power people,
who earned their power the old-fashioned way, are afraid the new
people will outstrip them with less effort, since the new people
have new tools.  Some professors of Shakespeare don't like their
new students being able to look up "To be or not to be," seconds
after typing it into a computer search program. . .while another
type of Shakespeare professor sees this as a way of furthering a
limited access to their favorite author to an unlimited access--
and to an unlimited audience.

The difference is that some professors are true teachers in true
fashion as was Geoffrey Chaucer's "Oxford Scholar," who was said
to be the kind of man who "would gladly learn and gladly teach,"
("And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche," the exact quote)
while other professors have a different philosophy that has been
described as that of "A Cat Guarding the Cream" (Huber, 1992).

At any rate, you may notice that some of the etext I have edited
for Project Gutenberg have a minimal number of hyphens and also,
widows and orphans have been minimized in pagination/margination
and also in phraseology. . .i.e. many more of our lines end with
the end of a sentence, a comma, etc., and rarely begin with only
one word from the previous line.

Thus begins the end of the tyranny of FORM OVER CONTENT as it is
practiced today in the art of publishing.

Part 2
***Drinking from a Firehose. . .I Dare You to Say that Again!***

One of the more famous anti-computer/anti-networking quotations,
which has been denied by most or all of those to whom is has had
the unfortunate experience of being attributed to.

This would be analogous to stating that having a library in your
reach was forcing all the information in that library at you.  I
submit that the statement that using computers or networks would
be analogous to "drinking from a firehose" is totally silly, and
needs little or no refutation.  Unless you are one of those whom
were tricked into trying to read the whole Freshman Reading List
. . .then you are in little danger of trying to drink in all the
information available on the nets.

The fact that a great deal of the information you may want is to
be found on the nets, without you having to get out of your seat
to get it, without you having to write it down to quote it, only
signifies ACCESS to that information. . .not that an information
supply is being forced down your throat.

Part 3
**Easy Storage Versus Easy Access. . .Compression Versus ASCII**

Another of the silliest statements cruising the nets right now--
Let Those Who Can't UnZip on their Machines Have the Sourcecode.

Now, verily, I say unto you:  the odds of a person who cannot do
an unzip being able to recompile sourcecode for a machine that a
system administrator has not already provided zip and unzip for;
very, very long odds indeed.

Perhaps. . .just perhaps. . .half the people I speak to around a
country that has more computers and more networkers than others;
perhaps half of them can get a zip file and unzip it.  When this
is brought up in network conversations about experts vs. novices
someone invariably says "Give them the sourcecode. . .its free."

Probably only about 1% of the people on the nets are programmers
who could make heads or tails of (trans)porting sourcecodes from
one piece of hardware to another.  These people probably already
know more then enough about zipping and unzipping, arcing/zooing
/booing/arjing/lzhing, and all the other ways of compression.

Of the people who don't know how to unzip, not even 1% should be
expected to know what to do with even the best commented code on
the nets.  This is infinitely worse than saying "Let them eat of
the Imperial Cake," and the authors of those statements would be
suitable candidates for retractions, apologies or should have to
"Eat Hot Electrons" spat at them from the masses.

(Sorry. . .Flame off)

The fact is the compressed files have driven Plain Vanilla ASCII
files off the nets to such an extent that even the sophisticated
Archie -s alice search is not likely to find you an uncompressed
copy of Alice in Wonderland:  one of the most widely distributed
etexts in the world.

This is ostensibly to allow more to be done with less. . .in the
specific case here. . .to allow more files to be stored on disks
. . .and fewer packets to be sent on the nets.

However, the amount of time spent to unzip the average file is a
large enough amount of time to defeat the time saved for average
persons sending and receiving average files.  Most files are too
short to take much advantage of compression.  However, as modems
and other hardware continue to incorporate compression modes for
users with the "invisible" program, then the users without unzip
can get the zipped files without ever knowing it.

The fact that drives cost half of what they did two years ago is
not making Plain Vanilla Files more accessible.  Of course, when
supersets of ASCII, such as Unicode or whatever, add another bit
or even another 8 bits to each character, two things will happen
. . .one is that anyone using this code will have to use more of
their space to store the same etext files.  If we adopt a 16 bit
code, then a one megabyte file will take two megabytes. . .and a
compression scheme will undoubtedly be created to reduce 16 bits
of information back to 8 bits when there are none of the oddball
new codes being used, and then the 8 bits can be compressed back
to what is today a somewhat normal .zip file, although half seem
not to know what to do with a .zip file even now.

Part 4
**Moderators Should be Moderate. . .Should They Not?

Several things have happened in 1992 that should be reflected on
in terms of moderation besides the epidemic of .zip files taking
.txt files out of the main stream where mainstream people cannot
find them any longer.

One is the famous "This Will Be the Last Posting on the Subject"
notice posted by users and moderators alike.

I am afraid I was forced to correct an assumption by some users,
when I received notes advising me that some other users had said
"This Will Be the Last Posting on the Subject" a few times.  The
questioners in question thought the moderators should not post a
message like that. . .and I was a little ashamed to have to tell
them that the people in question WERE the moderators. . .who are
probably going to have to learn to be a little more moderate.

I have been putting off telling this story for a while, and will
only tell it in barest detail now, but it illustrates one of the
biggest reasons why PLATO/NovaNet did not grow as people thought
it should have, and why Bitnet and Internet are the largest.

Back in the old days. . .discussion groups were actually "owned"
by certain people. . .who in some/many cases actually PAID money
to buy the computer space to put them up. . .often times for the
sheer ego of being "the authority" on a subject.  I must confess
for the record, that when I was a BBS Sysop back in the mid 80's
I had a few users who thought I was a little to hard on them.

At any rate, one of the major discussion groups was "owned" by a
person who apparently went way out of his way to insure that the
IBM PC he bought was "the first" in his locale, and apparently a
desire to be the "Peter Norton" of PLATO was involved, too.

The story begins when I discovered a "bug" in the latest version
of DOS five or ten years ago (I am being intentionally vague and
not naming the discussion group or the person, as I also have in
the rest of the cases I respond to on the nets, ever since I was
thoroughly "roasted" on one discussion group for refuting what a
person said there.  Even though I was correct, and no one said I
wasn't correct in the substantive matter of my refutation, I was
told repeatedly that I should not directly answer or refute note
postings that I thought were inaccurate. . .as I used to just do
a repost of the original note to insure accurate quotation, then
add my own comments.  This effort to let the people I argue with
remain nameless is an experiment.  It may not continue--advice?)

OK. . .so I created a "bugfix" and posted it on this discussion.
After a few weeks I was asked to post it again, so I sent a note
to the "owner" of this group about it, and asked that if it were
OK to repost it, would he get it out of the archives and repost.
His note to the person who requested it was to get it from those
archives, and his note to me was that I could repost it, but the
effort to do so had to come from me, not him.  I couldn't locate
it in the archives but I am the kind of person who keeps a copy,
so I reposted it.  (The note telling people to look it up in the
archives was publicly posted, several times, as you will see.)

After a few more weeks more requests showed up to repost the fix
and this time it was easy, as I had kept the file on hand.  This
seemed to keep everyone happy for quite a while and no one asked
again for quite a while, but each time the requests were posted,
the "owner" told them to look in the archives, which was hard in
those days, and might still be for all I know, but I just posted
the fix over and over, since no one seemed to be too good with a
search of the archives.

Now for the big climax. . .eventually the "owner" got the DOS to
use, ran into the bug, and posted another question about it.  In
any other case, I would just have posted the fix again, but this
time I decided to look for it in the archives, and if I found it
I was going to tell the "owner" to look for it in the archives.

I must confess that I had several other run-ins with the "owner"
and had defended several users from him in the past, telling him
and the entire list that I thought he was being too hard on some
of the users, who were asking very normal questions, but ones he
was tired of. . .much as many people today are tired of seeing a
new user ask about .zip files.

At any rate, I spent the entire afternoon in the archive files--
and could not find the note from the subject headers.  However I
had an advantage, I had the original note, so I found the date--
which made it much easier to find the original note, which I did
by date, even though I couldn't find it by title.

Then. . .I dug up one of the notes posted by the "owner" and put
it up as a response to his query. . .telling him to "look in the
archives" in his own words.  (If anyone should know his way thru
the archives easily, it should have been he, and I had spent the
time to prove the note was there before telling him.)

After a very short, and very fierce flame war (well, they didn't
call them "flames" back then, in which I did not take part other
than to say I was defending the "users' rights" and that "owner"
should not refuse considerations to the "users" that the "owner"
would want in return) I was "defenestrated" (tossed out).  To my
amazement, many of the users stood up for me, but the "owner" in
question would not reinstate me year after year after year.  The
remarkable coincidence is that on the day I composed this, I ran
into him after not seeing him for years, and asked him once more
to reinstate me, and found out the he had somehow come to be not
involved any more.  (I also got his permission to tell this, but
I still don't believe [these days] in naming someone in my notes
of this kind. . .so. . .if you know who it was, please don't say
who it was.)

The point of all this is that the Internet and Bitnet groups are
much more growth oriented because of their openness and will not
be outpaced by overly moderated forums on other systems and that
I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE THE DIFFERENCE.  Moving from PLATO to the
Internet and Bitnet five or six years ago made a huge difference
in how I viewed the networks, and that even though I may appear,
in some eyes, to still be pushing the limits, I must admit, in a
public manner, how much I appreciate you all, including those to
whom I have sent even the nastiest private replies.

So much for the past, but I like the direction we have come. . .
and tomorrow, in 1993, I will write something about the future--


Happy New Year!

=====================================================

Thank you for your interest,

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
hart @uiucvmd.bitnet or hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU