Right. From the perspective of this discussion, those people *have* "free"
access. They're already paying the base rates to buy chat and downloads;
WWW doesn't increase their line charges unless they opt to let it do so by
enabling in-line graphics *and* voluntarily spending more time on it.
> Certainly *some* sort of global-hypertext system will pretty much take
> over the Net eventually; I've got no argument with that. But it won't be
> WWW, at least not without major changes to make it more efficient. WWW in
> its present form is an artifact of free Net access, and will fade along
> with it into academic corners. "Eventually" is probably much further off
> than Eric thinks (my guess is 3-5 years).
I strongly disagree. I could give lots of reasons, but I'll content myself
with one: the Web is not inherently more expensive than other interfaces
for file retrieval. Yes, yes, I know about inline GIFs -- but graphical
browsers have mode switches that allow you to suppress those if you care.
Would you say that FTP is "an artifact of free net access"? If you think
of httpd as the successor to ftpd, I think you'll have to agree that the
history of FTP gives us no reason to believe such access will "fade into
academic corners".
-- Eric S. Raymond <esr@locke.ccil.org> WWW: //www.thyrsus.com/~esr/home.html
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