To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (46049 ) 3/16/1999 7:49:00 PM From: Rob S. Respond to
You can use a PC and some conversion software but it is not as simple as that if you want to run a high volume service site. A fax machine captures an image file scanned from the paper document or converted with the FAX print driver. If you were to start out fresh today and say "How can we design a system to send variable text and graphics over these funky POTS lines?" I doubt that you would decide on the current FAX transmission scheme. But legacy rules because FAX machines can't be re-programmed to use a different standard. If you had the whole mess of graphics and text standards to do all over again, you would probably establish a large base set of standard graphic (geometric vector shapes and overlay files) and textual components that would be stored on the users hard drive and then you would use vector graphics and scalable fonts to render everything much more quickly. There have been several efforts along those lines that are continuing today, involving Adobe, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, S3, Sony and others but as much sense as a new approach would make, particularly when it comes to sending stuff over the Internet, it remains mostly mired in legacy limbo. Hindsight is 20-20 - despite all the "vision thing" that most people credit the leaders of the industry having (Gates et al), it seems that they didn't see enough of where technology was heading to anticipate the major road-blocks by the new paradigm of rich content communication over open communications media.
