DAMNIT. Everybody keeps on saying that HTML requires more bandwidth than
ASCII and they are WRONG! You keep on assuming that the documents are going
to be passed as plain ascii. In any intelligent system they won't be. (I
am not claiming that the software out there has a high IQ, but I would claim
that a year from now it will.) Now use a reasonably intelligent compression
program and tell it that HTML is comming through, and on average you're
going to get a file that that is almost exactly the same size. There is
absolutely no reason why "</em>" would take more bits to encode than "*".
There, now I feel much better.
JWS