WYSIWYG editors and extraneous code

[Dan Lester]

At 07:09 AM 10/14/97 -0700, James Klock wrote:
>>And every step along the way, there will be editors and development
>>platforms, and every time we'll have some that seem to get the job done, but
>>are pulling all sorts of proprietary, let's-stick-it-to-the-other-guy tricks
>>under the hood.  

Yes, it will all get bigger.  But the "tricks under the hood" are a
different issue, and irrelevant here.

>I promised myself I wouldn't get into this one, but I would like to say
>that I think the thing that is being largely overlooked in this discussion
>is that bloated code fills the bandwidth faster.  With HTML, file sizes

I'm well aware of that, but also find it irrelevant.  

>tend to be relatively small, so nobody minds.  But as the kinds of
>information being distributed throught the Internet become more
>sophisticated, the extra 20% overhead of bloated code has real potential to
>choke the wires (especially that teeny little 28.8Kbd line going to the
>back of the average end-user's home computer...)
>If we set the precedent now of accepting hideous bloated code, we're
>setting ourselves up for a much more miserable tomorrow...

Again, use Word Processors as an example.  WordStar or WordPerfect used to
fit on one floppy (5.25 inch, low density) and used to run in a machine
with 256K RAM.  Of course no one even remembers when every program used to
list whether it would run in 256, 128, 384, or, heaven forbid, 512K!  o-)

But the technology keeps developing.  Yesterday I saw an ad for 32MB of ram
for $100.  And just as the software and hardware have developed in parallel
in word processing, so have and will they in networking.  Each step forward
in software inspires a similar step in hardware, and vice versa.  There is
no reason to think this will change.  Some of us remember 300 and 110 baud
modems.  Five years ago this university had a net connection of one 56K
line, and now 3 T1s are full.  So we'll get more.  And we'll continue with
upgrading oncampus subnets to 100baseT (as library has already done).  The
same will happen with home users as well.

So, code bloat will become a nonissue in net traffic.....just as it is in
word processing.

dan





>
>James
>
Dan Lester
dan at 84.com
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  Erasmus, 1534