harnad@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Stevan Harnad) (06/27/91)
The following message from PSYCOLOQUY Associate Editor Jack Hailman about scanning screen by screen is being sent to the entire list. Any helpful new information I receive will be reposted to the list. The message originates from an in camera discussion among the 50-member PSYCOLOQUY Editorial Board. > Date: Wed, 26 Jun 91 22:37 CDT > From: "Jack P. Hailman" <JHAILMAN@vms.macc.wisc.edu> > > I'm with you. No limits, but the key is module format so that one can > skip over things easily. Maybe some can scroll through things > continuously but my software requires me to load one screen at a time > (I'd love to get around that constraint). So I have to admit to > deleting entire long transmissions after reading the first screen. It > is critical that the first screen give contents and their lengths. > Dividing things up into many smaller messages helps me scan things a > lot, as I can simply delete what I don't want to read. But if something > is buried as the 10th entry in a long message, I have to get to it > screen-by-screen in order to read it. You may want to keep this sort of > constraint in mind while continuing to evolve formats for email > transmissions. It's probably not a good idea to scale down our format to the resources of the least powerful viewing system. We have set up in quasi-standard "digest" format so (1) those who have the "undigesting" software can smartly go straight to an item in a module and so (2) those with unix can invoke a screen editor that skips to the desired item by pattern-scanning rather than scrolling. I suppose (though I'm not sure) that Bitnet/VMS/CMS has similar capability. So you see it's probably not really necessary to scroll screen by screen. I think it's better if we encourage PSYCOLOQUY readers to inquire about how to use their mail software more fully rather than reformatting everything into small separate pieces because of scrolling problems. (Bigger modules dedicated to easily skipped categories were in any case voted in by the subscribership last year.) Stevan Harnad Co-Editor