[23114] in APO-L
Re: [APO-L] -L format
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William J. Turner)
Wed Nov 6 09:19:30 2002
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2002 09:09:27 -0500
Reply-To: "William J. Turner" <turnerw@WABASH.EDU>
From: "William J. Turner" <turnerw@WABASH.EDU>
To: APO-L@LISTSERV.IUPUI.EDU
>
>
> I do a newsletter in Word format for my engineering society and send
> it out as an attachment to over 200 people- some at home. I have yet
> to receive one complaint that said newsletter can't be opened. I
> venture to say that a vast majority of APOSOC people here are capable
> to receive rich mail and attachments.
>
A few comments:
1. Being capable of receiving (and, I assume you also mean reading)
rich email and attachments does not mean you prefer these styles.
The most computer-savy people I know tend to be the ones that
object most strenuously to being forced to view rich email and
attacments.
2. Some ISPs and other services still limit the size of emails. Some
document types, in particular Word documents, are too big by default.
3. Very large documents such as newsletters should, IMHO, be posted
on the web with an email sent out directing readers to it. This
saves on band width and eliminates the problem of above.
4. If something is to be sent out or posted as a format other than
plain text it should be in a format easily viewable by the
intended audience. Your engineering society may all be able to
read Word documents, but I know for a fact there are several
people on APO-L who do not have easy access to MS Word. PDF files
are better because at least the reader is free to everyone.
> In my chapter, years ago i was laughed at when I first suggested that
> chapter newsletters be sent by email. "Who would read their email" was
> the quote. Within about 3-4 years, email newsletters became the
> standard in our chapter, and are now widely done in most chapters at
> least. Likewise who knew anything about the web in APO 10 years ago?
> So, I think it's not a question of if we should upgrade but when.
>
Are you sure they weren't just laughing at you? :-) Seriously, I ran
into the same resistance. As for the world wide web, very few brothers
probably knew much about it 10 years ago since the technology was not
free, but rather under fees to CERN.
In LFS,
William Turner
Advisor, Delta Omicron
--
William J. Turner, Assistant Professor
Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, Wabash College
turnerw@wabash.edu
http://persweb.wabash.edu/facstaff/turnerw
