Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 15:53:33 -0500 From: Michael Hesemann <mhese@mail.hh.provi.de> To: john@december.com Subject: letter to the editor Dear Staff, It is really a burden to read everything online. I would strongly recommend to desposit a whole edition somewhere fur public downloading. It is not a technical matter, but a question of thinking about the user or not. HTML-Documents like the one of Nancy Kaplan are really great, but without the convenience of offline-reading they are a misfortune. Usually I connect to the net on late evenings, when my concentration decreases. So I downloaded every single HTML-page of the article for later reading, but wasted almost one hour this way. In the contrary it took me a minute to download an edition of "intertext" magazine, since they provide public files. I would be grateful, if you would publish this point of view, since it's a general problem with a lot of net-publications.
Thanks very much for your letter. We received several letters this month asking your same question. I'm sorry to say, we don't have the staff, time, or file space resources to make such a single-download file available.
There's also the point that hypertext is not linear, bounded text--your paper (or stand alone file) experience of a hypertext is different from your online experience of it. I understand from your letter, however, that reading is awkward for you online. If you are interested in just the text of articles, send an email message to the email Web browser at agora@mail.w3.org with the message body set to the URL of the hypertext page you are interested in. By responding to subsequent email that you will receive, you can obtain the pages linked to the page you requested. Using this method, you'll still have to submit a large number of email requests, but it might be easier or faster than downloading.
However, if you have a spare US $2 million, I'd be glad to launch CMC Magazine as a paper publication; and I'd give you a lifetime subscription ;). In the meantime, the (dwindling) staff here as well as the contributors don't get paid for their time and effort, so I need to conserve our time resources carefully--I could think of schemes to provide a satisfactory linear translation of a whole issue, but my priority is getting the hypertext version of the magazine out each month without driving the staff here crazy or burning them out, all on a budget of US $0/month. We can't even buy cookies for our staff meetings 8-(.
-- John December (john@december.com), Publisher/Editor, CMC Magazine