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ASCII versus HTML. Good-bye ASCII.
6/30/2004
E-mail is everyone's commodity now, everyone's tool, not just for IT folk. That's been true for some time, of course, but just like telephones and printers have moved - in some vague cultural way - from being "information technology" equipment to becoming generic "office equipment," so has e-mail become a generic communications tool that now stands outside of any ownership by IT, although it still requires IT support.
Picture the "Syllabus IT Trends" newsletter that you are reading now. Would you be more or less likely to be reading this if were formatted in ASCII? (That begs the question of whether you are reading this on a monitor or on a piece of paper that you printed out.) The branding and marketing people are telling us that you are paying more attention due to the formatting in HTML, and that:
- In general, our readers will pay more attention to HTML messages;
- Such messages, in addition to just being more pleasing to the eye, will better carry our institution's "brand" and marketing messages;
- We can include hyperlink navigation in the message itself, which means better tables of contents and linkage from the top screen to lower screens;
- When we get a little more sophisticated, HTML newsletters will tell us more about how our subscribers actually use the information we send them (I am a little unsure about how I feel about that.); and
- We can place more of the information that is important to us in that top screen of the readers' e-mail clients, thus increasing the likelihood that our message gets through.
And, guess what? Those things matter. They really do matter, in a strategic sense. The mission of our institutions isn't to support IT. The mission of IT is to support our institutions' missions.
I'm going to miss the challenges of formatting in ASCII. Of being limited only to mono-spacing that is no more than 72 characters wide, using only upper and lower case, plus dashes, asterisks, and few other unique characters to provide navigation for readers' eyes.
I wonder, in the year 2014, only ten years from now, how many people will have
a clue about what ASCII is (or was), much less be able to write out the full
name, on demand, of the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange"
(ASCII). Maybe that will only be of interest to historians of technology? If
so, those same historians are likely to point back to 2004 and write entire
tomes about the significance of this coincidental irony. The death of Bob Bemer,
the man who was responsible for the creation and standardization of ASCII, occurred
at about the same point in time that HTML-formatted e-mail overtook ASCII-formatted
e-mail as a standard of communication.
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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