HTML not so evil (was Re: Eudora Replacement)

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Derek Martin writes:
|
| I think it would take the average web administrator 10 minutes to set
| up a location on the web server to dump the documents into, password
| protect it, and teach the secretary how to access it.  Setting up a
| more robust, general-purpose solution can, I think, be done in under a
| day.  There are probably even existing solutions that can be set up
| quickly and easily...

Maybe, but the best case I've  ever  seen  so  far  is  still  rather
daunting for the average non-computer-geek type. First, the poor user
has to successfully get the file over to the server,  something  that
is  often  baffling  and  requires asking an expert to do it for you.
Then how do you get the correct URL  into  the  email  message?   The
chances  of  your  typical secretary getting this right the first (or
Nth) time is close to zero.

This approach is in competition with email  packages  that  lets  the
user  drag  the  file  into  the  email  window, and it automagically
becomes an attachment.  This is a couple seconds work, it works every
time,  and doesn't require asking a local geek for help.  Most people
who attempt the web approach are going to give up quickly and go back
to email attachments, which "just work" for them.

The  web  approach would be very nice if we could make it work with a
couple-second operation.  I've never seen this anywhere yet.

Well, OK; it's nearly that fast for me on this machine and on my home
machine.  But those machines have local web servers, I understand how
web servers and URLs work, and I type HTML directly to my  plain-text
editor.   This  does  not describe your typical secretary at all, and
never will.  And I don't know how to reduce this to  a  couple-second
operation  if  the web server is on a different machine, as it almost
always is for most people.