Horizontal scrolling

[Athel Cornish-Bowden <***>]

Sorry that my first message to this group should be concerned with a technicality rather 
than with Rosen's ideas, but there it is.

I find it virtually impossible to read Judith's messages until they have been quoted by 
someone else, because they come out with an enormously wide window. The last one, 
"Another excerpt on modelling", requires horizontal scrolling even if I put it on a giant 
window 2624 pixels wide spanning the total width of two monitors! I think the problem 
lies in the parameter shown as the Content-type. For example, messages rom Dan Fiscus 
include a header that reads

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

whereas Judith's messages say

Content-Type:    multipart/alternative;

As Judith appears to be using Outlook Express she may be stuck with whatever microsoft 
have decided is best, but maybe not. Are there other OE users who know how to configure 
it to send intelligible messages? It might be just a matter of setting it to send plain 
text and not HTML.  Alternatively, does anyone know how to set the ListServ servers so 
that it sends intelligible pages regardless of how it receives the text? Choosing 
"Non-proportional font" at the top of the age sometimes helps, but sometimes it makes 
things worse (as in the particular case quoted).

Incidentally, sending HTML in messages wastes enormous amounts of band-width. Judith's 
message on "Another excerpt on modelling" contains 3378 characters of actual information, 
but what gets transmiited through space is 9584 characters, because it's packed full of 
garbage like

The lessons from biology turned out to be that ?adaptiveness?, while
useful in economic systems,<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">&nbsp; </SPAN>is not
universally good; too much of it, in the wrong places, will tear cooperative
structures apart. </FONT></EM></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; 
mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; 
mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA"><EM><FONT
size=3></FONT></EM></SPAN>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 14pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Times New Roman'; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; 
mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; 
mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA"><EM><FONT
size=3>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Indeed, ...

Even if you choose not to see all this garbage it's still there: it still gets 
transmitted over the net, and it still needs to be processed in some way when it gets to 
your computer.

I'll try to have something more interesting to say the next time I post.

athel