Mum's word
As a stay-at-home mother and freelance journalist who regularly uses the web, I was appalled at Deborah Bee's patronising piece on mothers and the internet (Online April 19). All the examples she gives of why mothers don't use it - such as out-of-date websites and the difficulty in finding information - apply to everyone, not just mothers. The idea that mothers are a special case - "unadventurous" in the words of one of her interviewees - is outrageous.

To make matters worse, she says that mothers will soon be able to compare notes with other mothers on the web about how to "get a baby to sleep" or "give up chocolate". How insulting can you get? I've got better things to use the web for - and if I want to talk about babies, I'll go down to the local mother-and-baby group, thank you.
Dr Kim Thomas
kim@concat.demon.co.uk

I disagree with Deborah Bee; the net fits in very well with working mothers' time-saving strategies. Women multitask better than Windows and it is perfectly possible to order groceries from Tesco, breastfeed the baby and help the 11 year old with his homework at the same time. The problem comes when you try to get the five year old's supper as well.
Sue Jackson
(a working mother, online since 1996)
s.jackson@dial.pipex.com

Pogo head
Pogo's Tim Critchley wonders why "no other phone company or network has thought of using compression to offer faster mobile internet access before?" (Online April 19). Of course they have.

Wap already uses a binary tokenisation to keep the size of headers and tags down. The Wap forum has developed a special image format (WBMP) optimised for effi cient transmission over low bandwidth networks.

And this points us at Pogo's Achilles heel - images. Pogo will have transmit jpegs to give a coherent full access to HTML pages, but jpegs are already efficiently compressed so there's not much mileage they can give to the largest component of web pages. Of course, they could process the web pages into slimmed down versions, but AvantGo and others already deal with this.

So what is Pogo? A mobile phone that is mostly taken up with a high-definition screen that provides HTML viewing rather than WML (Wap) viewing. At £100 or £150 a pop it could definitely become the handset of choice compared to Wap over GSM, if only for the better screen quality and much larger range of web pages - just don't let them think no one else uses compression and don't believe it'll be like your 56k modem.
Bill Rivers
powerexe@btinternet.com

Text only
I think Douglas Rushkoff (Online April 19) is perhaps missing the point of the internet. While it's great to have web pages appear instantly, they do not necessarily offer good value for content. Adverts aren't the only thing you lose out on - pictures convey the news sometimes just as well as words.

Complexity isn't derived by imagery, rather by bad imagery. Wireless devices don't rely on Unix commands - they use graphical menus. Graphics are generally better suited for the masses - hence the success of Windows.

If you need any further proof of this look to Wap, a text-only service and all but dead - and it's not because of lack of support - it's simply not what the public wants. If all we had on TV was Teletext/Ceefax, TV too would have faced a premature death. It's the richness of multimedia that the public wants - no matter what the cost. There's a place for plain data, maybe even for the mass market - but news isn't it.
Chris Hudson
chrishudson3@cwcom.net

Douglas Rushkoff wrote last week: "This simple, open and accessible information architecture is the closest you can get today to the internet that those of us who were online in the early 90s keep talking about." I still use Lynx (on Linux and Windows) quite a lot and that's pretty close as far as I'm concerned. This is quite apart from the fact that the machine is a lot more useable than most of the Wap-enabled hardware out there now. Lots of us still use text mode browsing when we want something quickly.

That aside, the tone of the article is exactly right. Good sites realise the "graphics problem" and provide alternative versions of content (BBC News Lo-Graphics for instance).

I just wish more knew about good web design and development so they could do the same.
Darren Stephens
d.stephens@dcs.hull.ac.uk

Douglas Rushkoff made some good points about the usefulness of the simple New York Times and Wall Street Journal news sites. So - when will the Guardian be providing a site like that?
Eric Thompson
ej.thompson@btinternet.com

Online replies : try www.theguardian.com/pda/avantgo/.

Movie mystery
I read with interest your article E-movie (Online, April 19). Can I tell you that for some time now I have been happily copying my DV movies from camera to PC (out) and from edited Adobe Premiere timeline back to (in) DV tape in my Sony camera. The new Sony DCR-TRV30E is thus not the first Sony camera with DV "in" and "out". How is this possible? I own a Sony DCR-TRV20E and have done for some time.
Tony Hill
tonyhill@brit.croydon.sch.uk