Hello there: I don't even want to get into the .SIG issue that has been floating around. How well I remember those heady days in 1982 when I sent my very first Internet e-mail and was promptly told that my six line .SIG was strictly verboten!! However, regarding how data is transmitted on the Internet (or over any network for that matter): N.B.: Before I begin and someone decides to jump in; I am talking about straight ASCII text and straight up transmissions. No one needs to bring up lossey compression algorithms or differences in transmission technique such as CBR vs VBRnrt vs VBRrt vs UBR, etc, etc, etc... that is not relevant to the issue of what takes up more space in a generic network transmission. Having said that: A space (or blank character) has an ASCII value (E.g. 0=48, 1=49...A=65, B=66...Z=91... anyone remember what it is for a space?) and that character is transmitted just as if it was a letter, a number, or any another ASCII character. Therefore if we are talking about pure ASCII files (such as our text based e-mail messages), a file (or a section of a file such as a signature block) with 10 lines of spaces and one with 10 lines of other alphanumeric characters will take up exactly the same amount of space and will take exactly the same amount of time and bandwidth to transmit. However, an EMPTY line where someone only hit the ENTER key only contains a line feed and/or possibly a form feed (who remembers that ASCII value for <LF>/<FF>?). Therefore an empty line will NOT take up as much space as a line with multiple ASCII characters whether they be printable (letters, numbers...) or not (spaces...) and that line will take less time and bandwidth to transmit. Regards, Carlo Terlizzi [EMAIL PROTECTED] ____________________________________________________________________ Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.amexmail.com/?A=1 * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
