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Re: one possible motivation for X.509 -Reply -Reply
>>> Michael Froomkin <froomkin@law.miami.edu> 07/19/96 11:31am >>>
I always learn from your comments, Bob, but it's so HARD to read on my
software. Your machine is setting linelength about 8 characters too long.
Surely a tech whiz like you can fix this!
Sorry Michael, (and others who I may have inadvertently annoyed by this
problem as well.
The e-mail processor I'm using (which shall go nameless) doesn't provide
any built-in way of delimiting line lengths, and I haven't figured out a way
of writing a macro that would do it. So I have to do it manually, one line at
a time, and I'm not very good at it.
But on a philosophical level, we seem to have two choices -- stick with the
six or seven decades old 80-column punched card convention, and type
everything in a monospaced 10 point font (if you can find one on your system),
or we can make progress towards using proportional fonts, maybe even
support bold, italic, and underscored characters -- maybe even non-English
character sets.
I concede the incompatibility, but let me turn the issue around -- why can't a
lawyer who is a sufficient technical whiz to use a speech recognition
system for his routine typing adopt an e-mail editor that is capable of
word wrapping paragraphs to fit the needs of his screen, rather than
imposing your needs on every author?
If I were visually handicapped, I might prefer a screen that is only 40
characters wide, like the old IBM TV interface. But if my eyes were as good
as some of my younger colleagues, and I had a high-resolution monitor, I
might prefer a screen that could display a line that is several hundred
characters wide. And depending on what I was doing at the moment, I
might like to expand or contract or zoom in or out to fit my needs.
But how could I reasonably expect someone who was sending
something to me to understand my needs in advance, much less
understand the needs of everyone on a list such as this?
I don't mean to be unsympathetic, but the little tiny lines that you and
others send are not what I would prefer, and the hard carriage returns
make it difficult for me to do anything about them.
Which one of us should change?
Bob