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On 1/21/2011 8:13 AM, Ambrose Andrews wrote: > Count me as generally against. I don't see the advantage. The big advantage for me is being able to use embedded links. Hypertext links. Frankly, not being able to "see the advantage" of HYPERtext as opposed to PLAINtext strikes me as as extreme intellectual blindness. The difference between HYPERtext and text is simply embedded links. When links are not embedded, they tend to stop the flow of the argument. But they don't do that in HTML which means I, at least, would use them, to refer to source material, for example, even when the link is not the major or a significant point of the piece. Other advantages are more flexibility in formatting, abandoning kludges like asterisking words or phrases [*blah blah blah*] for emphasis and so on. But those are secondary or tertiary. Now, some comrades have expressed fear of security threats. This is due to the propaganda of companies engaged in what is essentially a shake-down. For example, I went to ask.com and queried how many computer viruses are there. The answer came back: "According to Spybot, as of Feb. 06, 2009 there are 287,524 viruses and growing." But a spokesperson for another "security" company, Panda software, had told a blogger a few days earlier [the post was dated Jan 29, 2009] that "Seven years ago ... there were maybe 100,000 to 300,000 viruses now there are 'millions and millions'." Yeah, sure. Let's take the 300,000 figure. That would be 12,000 a year in the 25 years since the first MS-DOS virus [(c) Brain] was spotted in the wild. Or even better, the estimate that in seven years, from 2002 to 2009, the number of viruses went from 300,000 to "millions and millions" which I will ultra-conservatively translate into an increase of two million. That works out to more than 1,000 additional viruses per working day over those seven years. Without even discounting vacations, sick days or three- or four-day holiday weekends. Does that correspond to anyone's experience on this list? Are you assailed by, say, .01% of these viruses, with your antivirus stopping an infection or attack every week and a half or so? Or even .001% of these viruses, which would mean an anti-virus "hit" three times a year? The inverse of .001% is 99.999%. Five nines --the gold standard in reliability. Judging by your antivirus, and how infrequently it reports an attack or infection, your computer EXCEEDS that. How is it possible that there are these thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of these fiendishly clever and diabolically crafted programs, and your antivirus did not have occasion to catch even a SINGLE one??? This doesn't pass the giggle test. Yes, there are some real threats. But the perception most people have of vicious credit-card stealing hackers lurking in the next link you click on is due to what is --in essence-- a protection racket. Like, how did Spybot KNOW there were "287,524 viruses"? Well, "cui bono?" [That cui bono should have been in blue so that if you clicked on it, your browser would have opened this page: <http://oaks.nvg.org/ys2ra11.html>. I would have followed it immediately with the following translation, instead of this bracketed comment]. That's Latin for, "who profits?" [And as that last paragraph is meant to illustrate, the segment above is a good example of why I want html mail: to embed links. I would have linked both the ask.com answer and the blog quoting the Panda software guy, in passing so to speak. [To go out of my way and place URLs in the middle of that text --as I did with the Latin phrase at the end-- would have overwhelmed the argument -- essentially, it would have been diversionary (as my link to a page about Latin phrases shows) [My guess is only a few people, would really follow up on the links, and probably only AFTER finishing the post, which is what I tend to do. Embedded links are the 21-st Century version of footnotes. [But I want the "footnotes" --the links-- to be there. You see, I'm a doubting Thomas. I want to put my fingers in the holes. <<link to 35-year-old Jimmy Breslin column about the execution of Gary Gilmore --if I could find it online-- would be attached to "doubting Thomas">>. [After all, HTML means "Hyper Text Markup Language" (and if I'd had it, I would have bolded the H,T,M, and L in those words), and the essence of *HYPER* text, as opposed to plain text, IS THE *LINKING.* [In writing my posts, I often do many searches, look at *tons* of web pages, earlier posts, Marxists classics, speeches by Fidel, videos of Phil Ochs, Green Day and Silvio, TS Eliot poems and an episode or two of Babylon 5 or Kyle XY ... it's a really impulsive thing driven by a bunch of dithyrambic lurches. [I'm not going to reproduce that in a post, of course, but I would like to go *beyond* same old text, the flat two-dimensional page we've had since the time of Papyrus rolls, to the three-dimensional augmentation of this created in the second half of the 20th Century. [So, for example, if I'd had HTML now, the word *created* would have linked to the first demo of a computer mouse back around 1968 or so, which was also the first demo I know of of hypertext functionality.] [And if I can be allowed to be even more recursive, "hypertext functionality" would have linked to a Wikipedia page where one would have read the following: "Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence." [Hypertext is not about formatting or texting too much (as the word is sometimes now being abused in the mainstream media). It is about the linking. Hypertext is the ORIGIN of the web, the reason the internet is called the web. The "www" in internet addresses stands for world wide web, and what made it a web, a series of interconnected documents, was the LINKS.] The other type of objections that have been registered to going to HTML are that comrade X is on a terminal, not a real computer, and comrade Y has a real computer --probably something like a "big iron" IBM machine-- and insists on using über-geek Unix "tools" instead of a real email program. And, yes, and I'm sure someone somewhere still has a hand-cranked gramophone with a big horn attached to the needle and is mightily put out by the switch to vinyl. And that person has it because they're an Einstein of audio reproduction. So it goes ... Considering the extreme purity of the distilled geekiness it would take for someone TODAY to insist on working on a text-only terminal or a Unix (not even GNU Linux or BSD) 'puter, I believe the comrades will survive the indignity of reading printed books as opposed to illuminated manuscripts ... err, I mean, bitmapped formatted fonts with hyperlinks as opposed to letter approximations, each one created from a six-by-eight-point matrix staring at you in green phosphors from a cathode-ray-tube screen. The latter, of course, being due to the shortage of good papyrus scrolls. When I first came on Marxmail, I thought the text-only policy was well-motivated and quite thoughtful. Many comrades were on rationed network connectivity, either with time or traffic limits, and thus we needed to forgo the "niceness" of HTML formatting and even the richness of routine hypertexting --embedded links-- for the sake of comrades, especially in the third world, for whom this would represent additional obstacles. I think the evolution of the technology over the past decade has made the volume of traffic issue moot several years ago. The difference between HTML-formatted emails and plaintext only is now insignificant. Time to join the relentless march of progress towards the bright, hypertexted, Communist future of the human race. Joaquín ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
