Re: Did my text attachment hurt anybody?

[Godfrey DiGiorgi <ramarren@bayarea.net>]

Nicholas, 

I received your downloaded document. I find it rather interesting. The 
fact that you sent it as a MS Word binary was a bit of an annoyance for a 
couple of reasons:

- - There was no need to send a Word document. There's nothing in the 
document that cannot be represented succinctly as plain ASCII text; the 
formatting was nothing to rave about and it used just one font, with just 
the header in boldface.

- - Sending the file as an attached binary could screw up the digest for 
many people.

- - Sending any attached binary file, and particularly a formatted word 
processor document, is a waste of bandwidth unless you know that all the 
recipients will have the appropriate software to read it. This was was in 
MS Word for DOS machines. I read documents on a Macintosh, and I don't 
have MS Word. Happily, of course, I have good software that can read any 
MS Word document and translate it to the word processor I use. This is 
unnecessary if you send things as ASCII text, in the body of a normal 
post to the list. 

The document is certainly no longer than a lot of the folderal that comes 
across the mailing list, but you should have simply included it as ASCII 
text in a message rather than as a binary file inclusion. 

One thing: how is it that you have Word but don't have a spell checker? 
Doesn't Word come with a spell checker? Every word processor I have seen 
on the Mac includes a spell checker nowadays, even the cheap ones. There 
were about 6 misspelt words in it. 

I appreciate your sending the article, however, and thank you for doing 
so. 

Godfrey