Re: ascii art for email and much more! (was: Copyright Notice, blah blah blah)

In article <199...@ladder02.news.aol.com>,
	pet...@aol.com (PeteCasso) writes:
>Again ignoring the emotional BS in this and other threads for the moment.
>Good, Veronicastein, you demonstrated what I said, email can transmit more
>than just pure ascii!
>
>So why do you have such a big hangup against developing ascii further,
>commensurate with the transmission capabilities of email/newsgroup/web? Is
>the hangup just because of the words in a standard that originated in
>pre-Internet days? 
>
..............oooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooo..............
And the debate goes on and on. This article is, once again, an explanation |
for people who don't understand why some people debate about what belongs  |
in this group and what doesn't. Now a special message to PeteCasso: Please |
read this carefully and think it over. Who knows, it might save you from   |
some flames.                                                              /
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|Ok, let's have another go at that beloved ASCII-topic. Let's get technical.
|ALL the characters in the ASCII-standard are those you can see on that
|nifty table VK posts now and then. Each character has its own 7-bit code.
|What the computer sees when it reads an ASCII-picture is a bunch of 7-bit 
|binary numbers. So, when the computer reads 1100001 (97) it writes an 'a' 
|with its standard- or selected font. Neither coordinates nor size are given
|. It just says 'a'. (I made the example on the fly, please correct me if I
|got the numbers wrong). If the file for example contains pixeldata, like a
|GIF image, or formatting and colourdata, like HTML, it isn't an ASCII no 
|matter how many 'true' characters you use. The only way to develop ASCII 
|further is to change the standard to, let's say an 8-bit (or better still
|16-bit or 32-bit or...) character-table. However, the ASCII-table is only 
|7-bit (128 different combos). That's the hard facts of life. Anything else
|is character art or art that happens to contain characters. Keep on
|developing character art! I like to watch it, on a WEBPAGE! /\
|___________________________________________________________/  \
                                                                \_________.
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,____________________________________('o`)________________________________|
|I don't like html in either e-mail or news.  Please don't use html in your
|news articles. Why? My news-reader, Knews, doesn't handle html and looking
|at html in Pine doesn't make me happier. The reason I, and many others,
|use those programs is that they're stunningly quick. The Sun UltraSpcarcs
|I use at the university are more powerful than most PC:s. But they can get
|overloaded too, since every student can do a remote-login on any computer.
|I also tend to do stupid tricks like run lots of programs at the same time.
|MIME messages are o.k. in mail and news, because MIME is a mail-standard.
|BUT: If you mime-enrich your text it isn't ASCII-art.
|________________________________________________________________________
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                                    ..oO Oo..                             \
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Now then, why are all these people, including me, bitching about pure    \
ASCII? You see, an ASCII will look the same on a Commodore PET            \
(a really ooold computer) and a Silicon Graphics Onyx (just about the      |
meanest graphics-machine money can buy!).                                  |
                           _                                               |
                          (_)                                              |
,____________________.   / 1 \   ,_________________________________________|
|                     \ / ton \ /
|                      `-------'
|Conclusion:
|ASCII-art is art made with the characters found in the 7-bit ASCII-table
|and saved as a pure text-file. Now, this group is the alt.ascii-art news-
|group and anything that isn't ascii shouldn't be posted. If people have the
|desire to post non-ascii stuff, fine! Just do it, but in ANOTHER group,
|please. This is an ASCII group, remember? I think people wouldn't mind if
|you posted URL:s to character art websites (java-animations, Text Art Plus
|and so on.). Just don't call it ASCII if it's not. Call it by its real
|name.
|_________________________________________________________________________
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                               \|/                      
                               -*-
                               /|\ (Det var den fulaste spindel jag sett!)


>Or are there any chances for a more open mind towards progress based on
>that old standard?
>
Like I previously wrote: Keep on developing art with text! Text art can,
however, never ever be called ASCII-art, unless it's a text file with
characters from that good old 7-bit ASCII-table.

Hopefully this was the last (boring) article in this boring debate. I fear
that won't be the case, though. I hope I didn't steal too many other peoples
ideas when i made the (ugly) art around the text. If I did, please put the
correct initials where they belong. All that's left to do is to send this
#%&!!! thing.

Hej, tja, bye o.s.v. 
_
Remember: If you smash 'reply', remove the .nospam. If you don't your mail
will bounce.

Bo Elovson Grey         = No, we won't charge you anything extra for =
d94...@efd.lth.se        = our spelingmisstakes and grammatic errors  =

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