a684@mindlink.UUCP (Nick Janow) (09/18/90)
I sent this letter in response to one of the "Files-on-line" offerings. Doug suggested I post it here for comments. I'm not asking for a particular format or for BASIS and other offerings to be in as many formats as are required to satisfy everyone, since that is unreasonable; there are just too many incompatible formats. Perhaps one way to reduce the problems for documents that are likely to be widely distributed is to avoid the use of special formatting capabilities. Plain old ASCII can get a lot of ideas across. :) Unfortunately, ASCII can't do everything. BASIS is meant for hardcopy distribution, and the boldface type, italics, editor's boxes and all the other fancy frills are useful for handling the working document. If Wil's control flow rational is the same one I have hardcopy of, it requires graphics, which means that ASCII can't handle it. However, if you're writing something that you think there is a wide audience for (via bbs), consider whether you really need fancy frills; maybe a few sentences of plain text can get your ideas across. >> >> 2200 CONTROL FLOW R X W.BADEN1 900916 18900 0 10 >> Desc: RTF text for control flow rationale > > I'd ask for a copy (this topic created heated discussion at our last BC-FIG > meeting), but I haven't the faintest idea how to read RTF format on a Mac. I > have MindWrite, which can read Word 1.0 and 3.0, but that's all I have. I > figure that this feedback is more valuable to you than simply a "no response" > to your RTF offering. > > Fortunately, I have a copy of Wil's earlier rational (for the proposal I > think), so I'm not totally in the dark. I'll have to sit down and think > about control flow; it is a complex issue and I don't want to restrict myself > to "what I'm used to".