Well, for one thing, the look and feel of the pc interface is subject to fads the same as everything else is.
But the most basic thing is that plain old vanilla ascii like this goes way back in History. A lot further than folks think. Like a bread platter from Gradesnica Bulgaria with 4 lines of symbols on it. And the thing about a sequence of symbols is that they are a damn good way to communicate an idea. All the hype these days is on moving images and streaming sound, which gets lots of attention, but the content usually sux. All over this planet, people are sitting in front of screens waiting for the information they want to read to come up. And they are waiting, because there is so much time being spent sending graphics and spam they'd rather not wait for. You'd think somebody would notice. The report that Google had _FEWER_ graphics, and a very plain page is one clue that some have. And to those people who are in fact, literate, and like to read, this is real progress. I dont see a need for Arachne to keep up with every bit of hype and glitz that is out there, but I do see a need to integrate real functionality. Reading USENET or other newsgroups on a gui screen just makes no sense. What is kinda odd, is that the Old BBS network had begun to use ANSI color codes in the email. Sure, you didnt have the html ability to use six different fonts, and you did not have italics, but you could change both the foreground and the background color of any letters you wanted on screen, which you cannot do with html, and... the fact is that our eyes come from the primate line, and have very good color recognition. Which is a talent that is not being used in any systematic way. Just as we see that the dish/cable has a couple hundred channels of trash, so also I'd expect the net to be full of crap like what Yahoo is doing to their website. But- that does leave a market niche for people who actually know how to think, and Arachne, for one, could do very well in that market. Who cares if we are only .1% of all those online? that's still hundreds of thousands of users, and - we could get organized. Maybe now is a good time to do that; Worldcom is in the tank because they expected the bandwidth they had to sell would be full of glitzy crap like that Microsoft and Yahoo are trying to sell us. And maybe it is a clue, that folks have stopped buying into more of it. The hype has all been about showing movies, full motion multi- media ported thru the pc. But then, there is the Gutenburg or http://www.ipl.org where people can download classic books, and thereby get more real information in a few minutes downloading than they'd get in a couple hours of streaming video. Arachne would do well to automatically generate an email to the webpages it cannot handle, and maybe a cc to a central database which can count the missed hits, and then forward that info to the people in the appropriate organizations that pay for the site, going around the webmaster, who would take it as a sharp criticism of his work. The Arachne tagline should mention the immunity to viruses. I dunno why email and USENET cannot be done in ansi scrollbar, with underlined links you can click on that will go into gui mode to display the webpages. And then be able to run SST to do the ordering from the websites that you can still see. But by not making it clear to the vendors that it is costing them business, and you cant do that nearly so well without SST; then we cant expect them to change policy.
