Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/04/10/23:06:09
I swore to myself I wouldn't get involved here, but I've been known to
break my promises (to myself) on occasion. Besides, I saw a comment I
felt compelled to respond to (so I might as well express my views).
Rant below... don't say you weren't warned!
On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Chalres grey wolf Banas wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 17:04:25 -0700, Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
> wrote:
> [snip]
> or what about people using palm pilots who can't read fancy emails? or the
> system administrators who use Pine to remotely read their email because
> they don't have the ability to use a remote client?
Pine shows HTML mail just fine (except for image placeholders). Since the
complaint was about formatting, rather than using images, I think the pine
argument doesn't hold. FWIW, neither does the Palm one (mine renders HTML
just fine).
> you'd be jacking them all by sending HTML. parsing bad HTML that clients
> like Outlook output is painful.
Oh, and pine has a nice feature that lets you see HTML source... Just
thought I'd mention that...
> > By far most of the HTML mail is UCE. Some of that is grotesque (not for
> > its message content, but for its presentation) but even the spam is
> > mostly decent HTML.
I'm more of a live-and-let-live person myself. I don't care if there's
plenty of simple HTML mail around. I, personally, find HTML mail
distasteful, perhaps because most of the HTML mail I receive *is* spam.
However, I have nothing against, say, the <b> or <i> tags... Besides, I
write HTML in vim, so what do I know, right?..
What I *am* annoyed with are multipart-mixed messages... They actually do
*double* the content for no purpose other than accomodating text-only
clients. If you want to send HTML mail, do it, but don't send *both* text
and HTML.
If you have a client that doesn't grok HTML, either get a better client,
or install a procmail filter that parses HTML into text (easy enough)...
or bounce the mail... or even show HTML as text. If the messages really
only contain simple tags, like <b> or <i> (or <br>), they should be
readable with the naked eye (as text), right?.
> case in point. it's annoying. you've said so yourself, though not in so
> many words. you have to configure your client to use the MS parser or else
> it's a little buggy. that'd be enough to annoy me.
Did I mention I had nothing against *simple* HTML mail? Well, the
abovementioned ain't it. Things that are unreadable in the source
shouldn't be sent. If you need 50 lines of JavaScript to convey your
thoughts, I don't want to know them (except for the JavaScript code
forums).
> it's my choice and i stick by it. you're forcing your opinion on us.
I don't think that saying "why not allow more than one format" is called
"forcing opinion"... It's rather the other way around, IMO.
To summarize: I think *simple* HTML is not a problem, but any mailing list
moderator who defines what *simple* is will be branded a dictator, and
there will be complaints aplenty. One solution is to grit your teeth an
bear it. Another is to give in and allow a little more HTML, then a
little more, until finally you get 800 line messages with 2 lines of
actual content... And yet another solution is to ban HTML altogether,
which is the simplest in the long run.
Just my 2c.
Igor
--
http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
|\ _,,,---,,_ pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ igor AT watson DOT ibm DOT com
|,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' Igor Pechtchanski
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I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the
death, your right to say it. -- Voltaire
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