[224] in World Wide Web
(fwd) Re: HTTP and no inline JPEGs???
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (yandros@MIT.EDU)
Tue Apr 12 16:38:19 1994
From: yandros@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 94 16:38:09 EDT
To: www@MIT.EDU
Soooooooo many people do the last one here that I just couldn't resist sending
it here. :-)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www
Path: yaz-pistachio.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.kei.com!hookup!swrinde!gatech!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!lerc.nasa.gov!purdue!news.cs.indiana.edu!mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu
From: Marc VanHeyningen <mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu>
Subject: Re: HTTP and no inline JPEGs???
Message-ID: <14252.766035715@moose.cs.indiana.edu>
Sender: mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu
Organization: Computer Science Dept, Indiana University
References: <2oabfl$ola@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu>
Date: Sun, 10 Apr 1994 22:41:55 -0500
Lines: 70
This is, I think, an excellent example of a net.moron posting to
c.i.w; I'd like to see this posting saved and held up as an example of
how to lool like a jerk. Let's see how many of the standard,
tried-and-true assertions are contained in it...
Thus said John Churchill <bonehead@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu>:
>Who's the idiot who decided that Mosaic wouldn't handle JPEGs?? Because
Is that username a joke, by the way? Your sendmail daemon confirms it
as an accurate address, or else I'd dismiss this posting as forged
flamebait. It seems so apt...
Ah! Flaming and namecalling people who make a product available to
you for free! That's worth at least 4 points on the jerkometer. If
you don't like their product, don't use it, or demand a refund, or use
something else that you think is better, or make constructive
suggestions. But there's no need to be insulting.
Also: complaining about Mosaic without specifying whether it's Mosaic
for Windows, Mosaic for the Mac or Mosaic for X. That's another 1 point.
>of this, I have to use inferior GIF files that look nowhere as good and
>are nearly ten times as large. Really, how hard would it be to put a
Silly assertions about relative sizes of image files and quality,
which are totally irrelevant to Mosaic because the colormap is trimmed
down so much for inlined images that the quality difference between
GIF and JPEG is almost totally lost! Another two points!
>JPEG decoder in Mosaic? It would easily cut the amount of Mosaic-related
Well, assuming you mean Mosaic for X (which most people who don't
specify which one mean) the full source is available. If it's so easy
to add JPEG support, why don't you do so and post the patches? One
more point.
>traffic on the internet in half and encourage everyone to leave the
>auto-load images switch on.
And, finally, the assumption that everyone is using a machine capable
of decompressing and displaying JPEGs rapidly. Many people have fast
links and slow machines, and the time saved on the transfer would be
more than lost by the time wasted doing the decompression. One more
point.
That's a total of 9; pretty impressive! However, I should think
future posts might do better; there are some important points that
could be included:
- In addition to calling the NCSA developers idiots, you should flame
them for not instantly responding to email with half-descriptions of
problems, bugs, or limitations in their products.
Also, you may wish to flame them for using Motif, for not setting up
a system in which one can easily use their product over a straight
dialup without the inconvenience of establishing TCP/IP
connectivity, or for being agents of the devil.
- You should talk about using "Mosaic servers", and mention more
buzzwords like "Information superhighway" and "500 channels."
- You should find some feature that has been in the spec for a long
time (e.g. the HEAD method, or the Expires: and Last-Modified:
headers) and insist that HTTP is lousy because it can't do this.
And on and on; think up your own at home, kids! It's fun!
comp.infosystems.www.flame, anyone? :-)
--
Marc VanHeyningen mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu MIME, RIPEM & HTTP spoken here
--
<a href="http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/yandros/home_page.html">chad</a>
