Refining what trees show

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: <ECOLING at aol.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 4:05 PM

> We often make much too little use of the capabilities of visual diagrams.
> Choices in these do have strong implications for our thinking.
> [snip]

[Ed Selleslagh]

Mr. Moderator:

Shouldn't a generally accepted and readable picture format be allowed on this
list, e.g. *.GIF, which is readable by all systems (PC, Mac) and internet
software, and which allows a serious compression so that files can be pretty
short.

The graphic, non-verbal communication can be very important in matters like
these: e.g. family trees.

Pure text isn't really capable of rendering lots of subtleties and belongs to
another age, and I am not speaking only about computers.

I am NOT pleading for a fancy all-graphic type of communication as is
fashionable, because that yields grossly bloated files, and compatibility
problems because of the very different types and versions of hardware and
software used by the members. Only for a minimalist graphic extension that
everybody can at least read/visualize.

I would appreciate it if you would publish this message and ask members if they
have any objections.

Kind regards,
Ed. Selleslagh

[ Moderator's reply:
  I have no simple way to look at the content of any binary file sent to these
  lists:  The system on which they are run is *strictly* 7-bit ASCII, which
  often causes me a problem with text which is not MIME-encoded (and I have
  taken to keeping a printout of the Windows character set from 128 to 255
  (octal 200 to 377, hexadecimal 80 to FF) simply so I can get a feel for what
  is being sent--and this obviously does not work if the post is from a Mac or
  a Unix system.

  Further, the mail programs on this system physically cannot handle a message
  which exceeds 300,000 characters in length.  I have yet to see an image that
  encodes to much less than 1,000,000 characters, so such messages will never
  be delivered to the input queue--and there is no way to transmit them if they
  *did* arrive.

  If you have graphics, include the URL for an FTP or HTTP server which holds
  them in a message to the list, and those who can make use of them will do so,
  and those who cannot will ignore them.
  --rma ]