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Re: html email


Ethan Tira-Thompson wrote:
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.

It also doesn't happen with non-broken mailers (in that case, I was attempting to line wrap manually, which almost certainly has something to do with it).


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?

In this case I was just trying to make a point that "standard" is a matter of interpretation. Hence the :-).


In a word, bandwidth.
It's a mailing list. Doubling a few KB a day is still... just a few KB a *day*.

...which, if several people are using it, on several lists, adds up. Now add, say, 100 people per day downloading it, and now it's several mb a day, about 100 mb a month, and now you're talking some more significant numbers. If you look at somewhere like gmane.org, if 5% of posts were HTML, I would guess that is at LEAST gigabits per week of bandwidth. And it's closer to "a few kb per *post*"


This is the first which blocks HTML altogether, which why I find it strange.

As previously noted, I'm pretty sure grc.com does the same.


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)

Right, but in this case I was just curious what you were using. :-)


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.

Only to the degree in which there is a relation. Alternate character sets are not a security risk, use minimal bandwidth, and do not allow you to do obnoxious things (I know we're all adults *here*, but since you're trying to make a general statement...). Maybe some day we will have a sane subset of RTF or some like that allows formatting without the problems inherent in HTML (wiki, perhaps? ;-)).


Although, I actually have some encoding features disabled because even *those* are obnoxious (although that probably means Thunderbird is buggy in this case; Chinese (IIRC) for instance does Bad Things to my font size).

--
Matthew
We are Microsoft. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. --Badtech


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