On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Clarence Verge wrote:
> We have placed ourselves in the "select" catagory just by using Arachne.
> That unselect "majority" isn't taking part in any attempt to improve things.
> They just go wherever the ride takes them. I have no personal interest in
> reaching them with ZBMs. I use GIFs for that purpose. ;-)
And I use PNGs for that purpose. Everyone reading this list
isn't using Arachne, and everyone using Arachne doesn't have the
necessary lines added to his mime.conf to be able to transparently
view a zbm... so they save 10 seconds on download time and then
must use 100 seconds to manually unzip, and then view.
My philosophy for webpages is universal accessibility. That
philosophy doesn't change just because we're on a list instead
of a webpage. The graphic I posted wasn't intended for just the
select few, so I use png because it's the most "efficient" graphics
mode for this kind of graphic viewable to a wide variety of browsers.
Otherwise, I'd use jpg.
> For reasons similar to the above you have chosen to use Linux and are to be
> commended for making what is to most, a hard choice. It is as hard to move
> from DOS to Linux as it is to move from Windows to DOS. The direct step -
> bypassing DOS - is damn near impossible for most. <G>
I never owned Windoze, so I wouldn't know about moving from that
to anything. Moving from DOS to Linux was very easy, however.
Yes, there's a bit of a learning curve, but when it finally hits
you how MUCH Linux can do that DOS can't do, there's no looking
back. The ONLY thing I can think of that DOS can do that Linux can't
is run on 286 and older machines... and since I don't have
any machines that old... <shrug> (well... Commodore 64 doesn't
count here)
Actually, I did finally format the DOS partition I have on this
drive last night... copied loadlin, etc. to it to make sure what
I'd already told Joerge didn't have any glaring errors. ;-)
So now that I have a half a GB dedicated to DOS, I'll probably
boot to DOS much more often; maybe as much as three or four times
a year. :-)
> As far as image formats go, when each one comes into being there usually
> are NO browsers that can display them. We, in the "A" group, are lucky in
> that we can immediately exploit the benefits of ZBM at zero cost and near
> zero effort.
> ZBMs are zipped bitmaps. Anyone, anywhere, can zip and unzip files.
> I agree that NS doesn't handle .bmps at all, but IE does,
IE 4.0 does NOT display bmps defaultly. I don't know about any
other versions.
But if the server identifies the zbm file as text/plain, then it
takes much longer to view a zbm than a png... Especially since
Linux Ararchne-GGI F2 key doesn't do anything. So, then the user
must drop to a console, start Arachne there, grab the graphic again,
(from cache?) then use F2 to save it, and then (only if the
appropriate changes have been made to mime.conf) view it.
If /usr/share/arachne/mime.conf hasn't been modified, then
he must drop to a shell, unzip, and then view.
> For perspective, the software required to convert .PNG to .BMP consists
> of two files totalling 110kb of hard to compress .exes.
> The .ZBM unzipper, PKUNZJR, is a 2916 *BYTE* .com.
I'm afraid I fail to see this as a tangible benefit...
When you're talking about converting standard graphics formats into
2+MB bitmaps, what's 110K?
> By itself, that's a good reason to consider the .ZBMs I think.
> Remember that Michael tries to keep the download under 1Mb.
So, you seem to be saying that Michael should stop supporting
the W3C-supported png format in favor of zbm, which apparently
only you and Glenn use, in order to save maybe 90K of package
size...
> Thanks Steve, for your arguments and patience, and All, for putting up
> with this sales message. <g>
Well, you can sell it all you want, but I'm not buying. ;-)
Seriously though, if the zbm changes were incorporated into
the stock mime.conf, I'd at least maybe use that format for
list-related stuff.
- Steve
