Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [41]
Text formats: E-mail
Whether you know it or not, every time you write an e-mail, compose a letter, draft a memo, or otherwise create digital text, you choose a format for the text. Just as with images and audio, text formats offer better and worse choices, depending on the situation. Choosing the right text format is especially important, though, since it’s the medium users do most of their work in.
As an example of the importance of text formats, consider the e-mail below:
From: John Smith (john@example.com)
To: Steve Doe (steve@example.com)
Subject: Meeting agenda
Attachment: agenda.doc
Hi Steve,
Attached is the agenda for today’s meeting.
-John
Here John has sent Steve an e-mail referencing an attached Word document. The only function of the e-mail text is to ask Steve to read the attachment. Opening agenda.doc, Steve sees four lines of text:
Meeting Agenda
Review of last meeting
Check-ins with team members
New business
The content of the Word document is fine; it’s the file format that is problematic. Because John put the agenda in a Word document, Steve can only access it by taking several steps:
double-clicking the attachment icon
waiting for Microsoft Word to load, if it’s not open already
reading the document, once it’s open (while ignoring the rulers, margins, toolbars, menus, and other items that Microsoft packs into the user interface surrounding the text)
closing the document
clicking to get back to the e-mail program
Obviously, it would have been more efficient for John—and much more efficient for Steve, the recipient—to skip Microsoft Word and type the meeting agenda directly into the body of the e-mail, like this:
From: John Smith (john@example.com)
To: Steve Doe (steve@example.com)
Subject: Meeting agenda
Hi Steve,
Here is the agenda for today’s meeting.
– Review of last meeting – Check-ins with team members – New business
-John
Consider the advantages of sending that message, instead of an attached Word document:
It’s faster and easier for John to write the e-mail, because he doesn’t have to open Word or attach a document to the e-mail.
It’s faster and easier for Steve to read the e-mail, because he doesn’t have to open Word to read the agenda, and then switch back to the e-mail program.
Steve can read the message on any device that reads e-mail, regardless of whether it runs Microsoft Word.
Sending the message this way is more efficient for both sender and receiver, and it’s compatible with more technology. This demonstrates the three qualities—elegance, brevity, and simplicity—that define the best choice of format.
There’s one other advantage to putting text in the body of an e-mail rather than in a Word document: file size. Similar to image and audio formats, one way to evaluate a text format is to measure how many bits it takes to express a given message. John’s note above serves as a good example. Sent in the body of an e-mail, the message takes up 122 bytes. (It takes eight bits, or one byte, to contain each character in the message.) Using Word to type in just the meeting agenda, not the greeting or signoff, creates a file that weighs in at almost 20 kilobytes, or 20,000 bytes—a more than hundredfold increase in memory to hold the same message.23
Text formats: Word
One may rightly wonder why Word would create such a bloated file for a simple message. The answer is that Microsoft Word isn’t designed to create digital text at all. It’s designed to create paper.
When Word launched in the mid-1980s, personal computers weren’t much more than glorified typewriters. There was no e-mail or Internet access for most users, so practically the only reason people typed anything was to print it on paper. Word became one of the most popular “desktop