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Date: Fri, 19 Jul 1996 12:59:45 -0500 (CDT) From: "Michael S. Hart" <hart@prairienet.org> To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU> Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU> ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Of all the billion computers in the world, probably about 1% actually have an up front way to read .pdf file, the other 99% are not likely, in my profressional opinion, to read any .pdf file you might post. This is an elitist approach to information, and will only serve a lot more of the "Information Rich" than the "Information Poor" as you all probably already know very well. .pdf is a proprietary format, and the owners would probably give away as many as they could, free of charge, just to become the primary, if not only, legal distributor of such software. There have been many movement to make these formats, and others, what could only be described as the "required government format" so that a file presented by the government would necessarily have to be in such format, and anyone wanting to read it would have to "toe the line." In the Library of Congress Etext Workshop two years or so ago, not an even small mention of plain vanilla ascii files. . . Even though the report was made available in PVASCII when they got an inkling that no one was reading the report, outside the "intellectual beltway." If you want unlimited distribution, the only, at present, way to do a good job of it is to use just plain ASCII, just like in this email. Few of you remember when ASCII did NOT contain lower case letters, or many of the punctuation marks. . .just look at a teletype machine, to see what was available, but ASCII was upgraded, without fanfare. The major trouble with the next upgrade, is that too many people want to put their contribution in the pot, to insure their language is all included. . .but no one wants to include bold, italics, etc., as what could be included in what will become the next Plain Vanilla ASCII. There is only one real argument here. . . Elitist or Utilitarian. . . It is obvious that the Elitists have won around here, as there are NO Plain Vanilla ASCII interfaces left in ANY of the computer courses or other courses that I have seen here. If you don't use a GUI here, you are dead meat. Michael S. Hart Who was an angry young cybrarian 25 years ago, and will answer to grumpy old cybrarian if I have to, but will point out that the emperor's new cloths have little content, and are mostly bells and whistles and ways to keep out the Riffs and the Raffs.
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