Re: html email

[One Angry User <angry at lusers dot org>]

On a balmy Monday, the 28th day of August, 2006, Ethan Tira-Thompson's computer deigned to emit the following stream of bytes:

> > I'm not sure silently stripping the HTML part is the right idea. The
> > point is to stop people that don't know what they're doing (and thus
> > don't understand why HTML is EVIL EVIL EVIL)
>
> That's a matter of opinion.  And if you don't like HTML or consider it a
> security problem, just set your mail reader to ignore it and display the
> plain text, and those of us who want to see the full content of the
> message can see the HTML.  It's not that big a deal, I'm surprised to
> see so much religious zealotry here.
>
> All of those links you provide are arguments against HTML-only email.
> I agree that's a bad idea.  But when most mail programs send both plain
> text and HTML, the arguments are moot.  As long as the plain text
> version is there, what's the big deal?

HTML takes up about 3 times as much space...

> For instance, you're right that it's non-homogenous.  But take that to
> its conclusion: some people want to use lynx to view the web, that's
> fine and there are ways to give them a usable experience (e.g. 'alt'
> tags for images), but non-homogeneity isn't a good enough reason to deny
> the rest of us the full web page just because some people want to live
> in their console.  There's no progress in technology if everyone is held
> to the same lowest common denominator.
>
> There's a well defined way to support both plain text and rich text in
> email. I don't see why the plain text crowd has to say the rich text
> crowd can't coexist when there's a viable way to support both.
>
> > If you plan to highlight your example code (and by what standard?),
> > you have too much time on your hands.
>
> Standard?  Keywords are blue, comments are red, that kind of thing needs
> a standard?

The style that uses red comments and blue keywords doesn't need a
standard, it needs an eye doctor.  Yuck!  Everyone knows keywords are dark
purple and bold and comments are blue and slanted.

Oh, and don't forget to set the right font for the code, otherwise it
looks even uglier.

> In any case, when I copy and paste code from my editor, it can retain
> the syntax coloring.  It's very straightforward.  But even so, piping it
> through enscript isn't difficult either if I was on a lesser platform.

Ah, so now we're talking about Postscript mail?

Besides, the readability of most code I've seen would benefit much more
from proper indentation than from syntax highlighting...

OAU