Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:57:59 -0400
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: WSFA:  Alive and Well
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> Mike Bartman wrote:
>
>> The "cons and events" link from the WSFA web page takes you
>> to http://www.wsfa.org/webcalendar/month.php (that's the
>> one I was looking at that is seriously ugly in Lynx) not to
>> wsfa.org/calendar.htm...that's probably the problem.  You are

> Aha!  That explains the bizarre claims that various events were on
> it that clearly were not -- and that it had been updated to say the
> Fourth of July meeting was at the Bungalow, when it clearly said it
> would be at the Scheiners' (and still does).

Obsolete files left lying around happens.  When observation doesn't
match reportage, checking to see if all are looking at the same thing is
often wise.

>> Where did you see the link to that?  Or did you just know it from
>> before?
>
> I had it bookmarked.  Most people go to web pages they either have
> bookmarked or find in a Google (or similar) search.  Very few people
> navigate down through a site's main page, except maybe on their very
> first visit to a site.

I bookmark some things, not others.  For instance, I have WSFA's website
bookmarked, but not individual parts of it.  It's just as quick to hit a
link on the site as it is to hit a bookmark, and this way any site
changes are handled automatically.  If the calendar was my most frequent
place to go on the site, I might bookmark that though.

> It would be interesting to look at recent web hits on calendar.htm and
> on webcalendar/month.php.  I wouldn't be surprised if the former is
> still getting more hits than the latter.

I would, but it obviously gets at least some hits.  A redirect would be
wise.  Did you suggest that to the webmaster?

  >> I disagree that you'd need another ISP account, since how the
>> packets get to and from your machine isn't really relevant to
>> whether or not your security is in danger (unless you have some
>> sort of unusual, very limited ISP service?).
>
> I have a standard shell account.  I dial into Panix with my VT420
> terminal.

You might want to drop the "standard" from that...shell accounts are
getting more rare all the time, both due to the hassles for the ISP and
the limited percentage of the customer base that can do anything with
them even if they had it explained what it was.  Most people interact
with web sites these days for everything (web, mail, chat, lists, news,
etc., etc.).  I've found that a lot of people don't even have e-mail
software these days (making mailto: links problematic).  If you tell
them this, they say they do, that they get mail all the time.  They
really don't understand the difference between webmail, POP, IMAP, or SMTP.

> Packets never get to or from my PC (or my DEC Alpha, or
> my brace of Vaxen), which I all leave powered off 99% of the time
> (including now) anyway.

Ok, so you do have some sort of unusual, very limited ISP service. ;-)
Yes, if you wanted to do browsing of the web the way it's typically done
these days, you'd need a different kind of internet access.

> You seem to be suggesting I should also get a
> PPP account and the hardware and software to support it.

No, PPP is almost as rare these days as shell accounts (and I haven't
heard of anyone using SLIP in over 10 years).  Most have FIOS,
cable-internet, or DSL, with rural folks using satellite, or sharing
more expensive links using WiFi (even my dad, in rural Montana, has
given up his copper dialup in favor of a directed WiFi link into town,
where a shared broadband link connects up to the rest of the world).
PPPOE is used by some, such as Verizon, for DSL connections though.  We
passed the 50% mark for dialup use a couple of years ago.

> Why?  Just
> to compensate for the occasional clunky or broken website?  That would
> be killing a fly with a bazooka.

No, there are other reasons, but I won't waste the time explaining since
you've decided already.  Most of the websites I use on a daily basis
won't work well, or at all, using Lynx or other non-GUI browser, and the
trend is strongly in that direction.  Some media sites I've found are
completely Flash-based (even I can't see them, since I don't let Flash
onto my machine from untrusted locations), and most sites use a lot of
images, sometimes in ways that are critical to making use of the site
(like for buttons and other controls as well as for content).  The days
of text-only websites, with rare exceptions, have passed.

> Any security issues, Panix takes care of.  I'm not really interested
> in running what amounts to a one-person ISP, and dealing with all the
> resulting headaches.

It's not that bad...I did it for years.  Ran my own mail server, DNS
server, POP server, etc. on a Red Hat Linux system.  I started that back
when I was on a PPP dialup connection (I used Fetchmail to get mail from
my ISP until I got a DSL link and went to Sendmail).  One advantage is
that I don't have any ties to the ISP...it's all on my machines, and I
can connect to the net somewhere else without any real hassle other than
changing IP numbers (when they are static...not even that when they get
set automatically in the router and I use local addresses for my
machines as I do now).

 > Similarly, I'm on the power grid instead of
> running my own generator.

Me too, though as soon as I can afford it, I'm seriously considering a
natural gas-powered stand-by generator.  It's hard to make a living when
the power is out, as it was for 17 hours a couple of months ago.  Other
nearby places had outages that lasted for days.

>I don't see any value in having a computer
> of mine directly on the net, except boasting rights.  And that
> wouldn't be much of a boast these days.

Boasting has nothing to do with it.  It's an accessibility issue, and a
feature issue.  For instance, part of my current mode of making a living
uses Skype for conference calls and IM-like short communications with
co-workers in other parts of the country.  Skype won't work over a VT420
terminal connection to a shell account.  It would also be seriously
awkward to move documents through a shell account to and from
Sharepoint, and could be seen as violating NDAs.  The support call I got
today that involved being sent an image of a screen would have taken a
lot longer, or been impossible, with your setup, but was trivial with
mine.  The web site I've been creating is easy to update and check with
Dreamweaver and Firefox each displayed on a separate monitor on my
system...changing something, uploading the change to the site, and
verifying it in Firefox is about a 3 second cycle time involving only a
couple of mouse clicks for most changes (my DSL is only 128K upload, so
image pages can take a while to send).  Using vi or whatever, and FTP
would be much slower, take a lot more typing, and lynx wouldn't let me
see the site the way 99.99999% of those who will view it will see it.

If I just used the net the way I did in 1993, 1993 capabilities would be
fine...but with increased capability (what has created the increased
risks due to how it's been done) has come ability to easily do things
that weren't possible in 1993, or which were very difficult in 1993, and
expectations have risen along with the capabilities.  If I stuck with
transportation capabilities available in 1800 and told someone I
couldn't get to a meeting in Boston in less than a week, they'd decide I
was a kook and deal with someone else.  The same would be true if I used
a dialup account for text-only access to the internet.

> Ironically, I may be the first person to put a microcomputer directly
> on the net.  I did so on April Fool's Day, 1981.  It was a 8080-based
> CP/M machine at my workplace.  I used a terminal to dial into the
> local ARPANET TIP at 300 bps, and entered some hairy TIP commands
> I found in an online manual.  Then I typed the CP/M commands that
> told the computer to use its serial port instead of its screen and
> keyboard.  Then I attached the modem to the computer's serial port
> instead of the terminal, having first soldered a special jumper cable
> that allowed me to do this without the modem hanging up.  Friends of
> mine were able to get to the CP/M system's command line prompt from
> home, via the net.

Clever.  Reminds me of the time I managed to send a message from my
Fidonet BBS system at home to my SPAN mail account at Goddard.  Only
took two hours to get there...routed through Fidonet to Arpanet to
SPAN...about 6 links total if I remember right.  That was about 1987 I
think...have to check to be sure.

> I can't convey just what a hilarious stunt the idea of putting a
> desktop machine directly on the net was in those days.  There were
> only about 200 computers online, and they were all million-dollar
> machines, each atached to the net with quarter-million-dollar
> refrigerator-sized Interface Message Processors.

The idea of a desktop machine that wasn't a toy was pretty hilarious in
those days too.  That was the time of the Apple II, Atari 800, PET CBM,
Commodore 64, and S-100 CP/M machines.  The IBM PC was at least a year
off, and the Mac was 3 years in the future.  There were some reasonable
small machines (like the Sage 68000), but they weren't well known and
didn't last...and they were in the $10K range by the time you got done
adding a terminal, software and other such things.

>> Sites that use things invented since 1990 aren't "broken", they just
>> don't match your preferences for technology.
>
> The vast majority of even the newest websites work fine with Lynx.
> And the proportion that don't is *decreasing*, if only so as to be
> usable by the handicapped.

Government sites often have requirements to be accessible, and sometimes
have alternate sites, or alternate CSS descriptions, for that purpose.
Commercial sites are usually not limited like that, and some are
oriented around non-text (like You-Tube for instance).  Most would look
pretty bad in Lynx...like the WSFA calendar does.  You can get the info
from them, but it's awkward and ugly and takes work, where looking at
the GUI version is simple, quick and easy.

>   Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on
>   a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the
>   Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on
>   another computer, another word processor, or another network.
>   -- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web.

I agree completely, and think that all sites should follow the current
standards closely.  Use of browser-specific extensions tends not to be
necessary these days like it was 10 years ago when HTML wasn't well
designed to do more than basic text and browser makers added proprietary
extensions to let designers do things they wanted to do.  Most of those
extensions have been added to the standards and are widely supported on
most browsers now, and new methods, like CSS, let a lot of things be
done better than the proprietary extensions did anyway.

Use of proprietary extensions is very different from using features of
the current standards though.  Technology marches on, trampling
Luddites, as always. ;-)

-- Mike B.