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Re: html email


Combining replies below:

"Mike"? Who's "Mike"? :-)
Err, sorry I meant Matt (I have a friend with a similar user id whose name is Mike)

Opinion? Um... I did mean "HTML *mail*" above, and since I don't think
you're disagreeing with that, I apologize for the ambiguity.
I think we were on the same page. My point is the "HTML mail is EVIL" comment is definitely a matter of opinion. I happen to prefer messages which word wrap properly and support rich text.

For instance, take a look at what happened here:

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
[...]
UGLY!!!! You *prefer* that mess? It just gets worse and worse and the thread bounces around. Did you reply 'its' to my "For instance..." or is that just continuation with bad wrapping? People have to work through the formatting instead of just reading the actual content. This doesn't happen when things are <blockquote>'d in HTML mail.


A second point is that I generally deal with adults, not font-happy kids. If someone thought it worth their time to apply some formatting to make something clear, I want to see it because they probably had a reason for doing so.

Given that I meant /mail/, I think this is irrelevant, but on a vaguely
related note, I've seen plenty of illegible or outright unusable web
pages
because some jackass designer assumes that the entire world runs MSIE
with
default settings. In some cases, it turns out to be a nice but ignorant
designer that promptly corrects the problem :-), but it still happens.
Thank
Mozilla for Page Style->None.
Right, which is the author's problem. So complain to the relative handful of sites that do stupid stuff like that, and appreciate the *vast majority* which are cleanly styled. And as you point out (and agrees with the point I'm trying to make), there are well known work- arounds to strip the style of badly designed pages.

So to relate back to email, have the server bounce the messages that are *only* HTML email, and I still see no problem with passing messages that have both formats. I don't think you're going to have a problem with people making their mailing list postings into myspace pages. Only spam bots do that, and there are better ways to block them that would also prevent them from sending text-only ads.

Oh? Funny, when I look at source, keywords are green, comments are gray,
normal text is cyan, etc, and everything has a dark blue background. See
what
I mean? :-)
Is all black preferable to *neither* color scheme? You can only read highlighting that uses your personal color set?
Even if you say 'yes' just to spite me, then just switch to the plain text if that's really what you believe.


In a word, bandwidth.
It's a mailing list. Doubling a few KB a day is still... just a few KB a *day*. As for archiving/digests, just include the plain text version if the HTML is too difficult to process. And it's not that hard to process -- I've seen plenty of mailing lists which allow the subscriber to choose their format in order to avoid these issues. This is the first which blocks HTML altogether, which why I find it strange.

Ah, so now we're talking about Postscript mail?
enscript has HTML output -- see the -W flag.

Never saw that; what editor do you use? Anyway, AFAIK KATE doesn't do
this
(and I *dare* you to call it a "lesser editor" :-)).
I'm using XCode, and FYI, Kate has an 'export to HTML' under the file menu which is almost as convenient (Kate is a good editor too, I've definitely made good use of it)
The also excellent SubEthaEdit also can copy with styles, or copy "into" raw XHTML, which is kind of a neat trick à la enscript. (can directly paste into a web page's source, don't have to rely on a GUI editor to convert the styled text)
But anyway, my point is that this is not hard to do.


-ethan

PS In a modern email reader, you will probably see a ` accent on the "à la" above. But perhaps we shouldn't support other languages' characters because that would be non-homogenous in older consoles which don't support it, and english speakers don't like to see funny accents in their ASCII text.
I know I'm baiting there, but hopefully you see the relation? Time marches on, and there are better ways to do things.



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