[EM] CVD home page

[Rob Lanphier]

On 24 Feb 1996, Ed Still wrote:
> Rob, you asked in "What is PR?" whether I was in charge of the CV&D home page.
> 
> Steve Hill has the secret key to the main CV&D home page on IGC.  I handle 
> the subsidiary page on Compuserve (part of my own home page set up).  It 
> consists of mainly the full text of any PR statutes I can get clean enough 
> copies to scan (or else my poor secretary has to type all this stuff).

Gotcha.  OK.  Thanks.  I wanted to make sure I was sending stuff to the 
right place while respecting Steve's wish not to receive a pile of mail.

> I have just added a new wrinkle to the New South Wales page.  I have put the  
> ASCII text in a ZIP file so folks can download that.  
> 
> First, do you think that will be useful?  

The text is so small that I don't think compression is worth the savings, 
especially since you have to go to the page with the full text 
uncompressed to download the text of it compressed.

Most people that want to save a copy can print directly from their 
browser or copy the contents to the clipboard and paste it to their word 
processor, so, no, I think just the uncompressed text is probably just fine.

> Second, is ASCII/ZIP the way to go?  A full text would take up about 4 times 
> as much space, but do most folks have a unZIPper?  I could add a link to 
> download a freeware unZIPper. 

I doubt it is worth the trouble.  The file is something like 12K 
uncompressed, which even on a 14.4K modem takes about 7 seconds.  In 
addition, when you zip up a file, you then need to deal with the 
differences between text files on PCs, Macintoshes, etc., which is just a 
headache.  If you leave it as plain text, the web browser usually can do 
a good job of masking the difference.

> Third, does the link work OK for you?  Please download and check -- and let 
> me know yes or no.

Looks fine to me.  I'm assuming we are talking about:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/votelaw/voting.htm

Rob Lanphier
robla at eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~robla