Thomas wrote:
>Why do you/we want RTF on the WWW?
Its advantage is in sharing documents with non-Netizens (who get their
secretaries to write a Word doc and attach it to an email). I remember
when I first got a CD drive and was annoyed at the number of HTML pages
on magazine disks, with no simple, adequate viewer. I guess a new machine
without a browser is a rarity, but office workers are most at home with
Office. Or are they? None of them seem to know about RTF! IE5.5 has print
templates, so I guess that's yet more user-control taken away from HTML.
To me, converting Word documents to HTML is more useful than to RTF.
But M$ screw up HTML as well. On a borrowed Win98 machine, my hand-coded
HTML was called "Microsoft HTML document" or some other lie.
>Is it a lesser evil compared to MS-Word .DOC? Is it less secretive?
I hope so, though Clarence uses it as a derogatory acronym. More word
processing software can read RTF than M$ .DOC
>DOS progs that need Windows are an unnecessary nuisance? Does the author
>think it so much easier to go through the Windows GUI than to simply type
>the command under DOS?
In recent correspondence he says, "you need to add something which will
allow 32 bit addressing in the OS. That is all wp2html needs, it is just
standard C code but for Word files cannot manage with 64k data segments.
You can also run wp2html under linux on a 386 box, but I guess that is
not what the DOS users want. To get 32 bit DOS without ANY windows you
would have to load a DOS extender like QEMM."
Well, I have QEMM (not just sitting on the shelf), so I'll wait for
some DOS guru input on this. BTW, he says that OS/2 will run it, as
will DOS with Win32s, but I don't know anyone who wants Win32s, and
surely Win3.1x would have to be running?
>Or does the author think a user would go into shock or suffer a
>heart attack upon seeing a command prompt, and then his/her survivors
>would sue?
Hehe. Last week I found myself making excuses for F-prot, while it
was doing a quick job (w/o Dumb Scan) in removing Magistr. And I put
the Access menu prog on the boot disk when I load some old games for
a youngster. Thinking back to my own first encounters with the command
prompt I remember the problems from not having proper, structured
training (it was tagged on to the end of a course). Maybe new DOS
users are most likely now to come through Windows and the Net --
getting Arachne and abandonware games for old PCs. They've never had
it so good!
Regards,
Jake
