Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Larding: Birth of a new Meme ?

I today had cause to send out the following e-mail:

[ With regard to e-mail composition ]

  • Graphic signatures are evil and should be avoided.
  • HTML text bodies are evil and should be avoided.
  • Replication of body in HTML and Text is evil and should be avoided.

…not least for reasons of accessability for the disabled, but also because of the “who are you to decide what capabilities my e-mail browser is required to support in order to read your message”?

If you think otherwise, then please explain to me why e-mails are not routinely shipped around as embedded StarOffice or PDF documents? Why it is that JavaScript is not typically required to read e-mail content? Why nobody in the real world uses RTF?

Yes, that is a “thin end of the wedge” argument, but it is a pretty good argument; UNICODE and complex-character set does not require HTML, because that’s what the:

Content-type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1

…header is meant to solve.

So, [NAME], at the risk of being called “confrontational”, having performed some rough maths on your previous e-mail message:

Why might you insist on larding your e-mail into a 9258-character behemoth, when only 1819 bytes of it are actual content?

…please? 😎

…to which I received a brief followup response (amongst several others):

From: Daniel Ellard
Cc: Alec Muffett

And thank you for the phrase “larding your e-mail”.

I think we’ve witnessed the birth a new meme.

The odd thing is that “to lard” / “larding” is actually an appropriate and legitimate verb – see also define:larding – and it is one of my favourite words to evoke the process of fattening up a document to make it prettier, but not necessarily to its net benefit.

That the word might be unknown to some people never really struck me, but Daniel’s reaction gives truth to my boss’s suggestion some months ago that (for the benefit of some of my colleagues) I ought to remove a reference to “larding” from a document I was writing, in order to replace it with a more common word.

Nonetheless I decided to document it here just in case at some point “lard” becomes the next “spam”, so to speak.

“LARDING”, TO “LARD” A DOCUMENT :- the process of expanding the size (in kilobytes) of a e-mail or other computer document by means of extraneous or redundant formatting information; there is no strict guideline, but in usage a document might be “heavily larded-down” if its final format consumes perhaps 4x (or more) the diskspace of the same information presented in plain-text form, after making allowance for tabular data and images.

⊞

Comments

5 responses to “Larding: Birth of a new Meme ?”

  1. xencat
    re: Larding: Birth of a new Meme ?

    Purely for playing devils avacado. 🙂 Why is this page in HTML… How much hard disk storage do you have at home? What resolution do you store your pictures at (with approximate figures per image)? Doesn’t HTML and plain text at least give you an option? HTML can actually provide better accessibility than plain text.

    Hmmm.

    Reply
  2. alecm
    guacamole

    1) Because you’ll use a web browser to look at it; you’ll notice lack of javascript, and that aside from the necessary per-posting images which illustrate the articles, and the random picture generator which i consider an artistic statment, that it loads as a single block of HTML for optimised retreival; also that most of the style is CSS and I am gradually expunging anything that isn’t, though that’s not a high priority.

    2) 1.5Tb but i don’t see where that’s relevant anything since i don’t share that with other people in any way.

    3) most of the images which you will find on the website are cropped to a vertical height of 660 pixels with a maintained aspect ratio, to fit nicely on a 1024×768 worst-case screen that i now consider to be the minimum you’ll encounter other than on mobile devices. In iPhoto I store them as they came off the camera, for better/future re-encoding to a smaller size. most of the photos are clearly off in a photo directory, or illustrate an article. as mentioned above the primary exception is the random picture generator, which is there as a hook and as an artistic statement, along with the random word generator, and the random number generator.

    4) ok, so *you* go look at a multipart/mixed message which has alternative HTML and text views, and attachments, and compare and contrast its clarity with just a plain text mail. Use something basic like UCBMail as a client.

    5) with more processing, anything can be pretty good. But which is simpler to do/get right, rendering text-to-braille, or richcontent-to-braille?

    Reply
  3. alecm
    re: guacamole

    ps: 😎

    Reply
  4. Gene
    re: Larding: Birth of a new Meme ?

    your disco(*) about “larding” reminds me of the quizzical looks when Tony Blair was accused of “sexing up” the Iraq situation. Stateside, that translates to “jazzing it up” or (simply) “embellishing”, as you’re aware.

    In lieu of “larding” the term on this side of the Big Yellow Pond is “fattening up” or (simply) “bloating”.

    Some day, perhaps you’ll learn to write in Esperanto, and the world will be a better place. (queue guffaw)

    * disco=discussion. why is it that an Aussie has to abbreviate any word of more than two syllables, then add an [o]?

    PS: oh, how this comment would be easier to read if you allowed [strong] and [em] tags.

    Reply
  5. alecm
    re: Larding: Birth of a new Meme ?

    Looks OK to me. 😎

    Reply

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