html email

[mwoehlke]

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 "Ã  
> 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