Philip Hazel wrote:
>
> On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, Paul Makepeace wrote:
>
> > "Your message didn't get delivered as well as you might've hoped. Here's why
> > http://mta.mycom.tld/oops.cgi?lang=en&code=552&msgid="
>
> I'm sorry. That would annoy me. Why not *tell* me what happened rather
> than indirect me to a (remote) web server that may be down. Contrary to
> the general way the world is going, I don't always have a browser
> running.
I tend to agree. But in the same time, there's a beauty in Paul's
suggestion, in that he propose to rely on a presentation technique
that is capable of supporting multiple languages.
> > I meet people who don't see a single use for HTML or non-ASCII in email
> > either. Baffling isn't it?
>
> I have to react to that. I see no use for HTML or non-ASCII in email
> *when used as a medium for correspondence*. I have no problem with
> sending attachments in any form you might want, but if you just want to
> send some text to somebody I don't see the point of wrapping it up into
> some fancy format, except that it uses more bandwidth and therefore
> makes more money for somebody, I guess. Cynical? me? well, yes :-)
So, you want to keep it simple. I also like it simple. Unfortunately
the world wide reality is usually not quite that simple. When you
mention non-ASCII as if it's something undesirable I cannot help
associating to my native language, which happen to be Swedish. It's a
well known fact that ASCII wont do as "medium for correspondence" in
my native language, as is with most non-english langauges. I thought
english spoken engineers now a days had some understanding about
that. In that regard, MIME is a good thing, not a bad one. And with
MIME comes HTML capability. More over, the only viable long term
replacement of ASCII is Unicode. HTML is engineered to support
Unicode. Do I need to say more?
> Sending, on every message, a fancy "business card" in HTML with a logo
> that makes it many times bigger than the actual message is particularly
> annoying.
I can only agree. This is very annoying, as is volumious signatures,
or volumious quoted text without reason.
> I read my email using Pine on Unix. I now never bother to look
> at gratuitous attachments in HTML (or anything else, for that matter).
The Pine developers always have the choice of supporting HTML in a
similar fashion as Lynx does.
> [It's different if the message says "here's an attached
> document/webpage/binary for your attention".]
I general, I think the trend is to publish your documents on the net,
and only sending hyperlinks to those it concerns. Confidentiality is
of course still a problem, but there's techniques to address that as
well.
> I'm probably an old-fashioned dinosaur (having been around rather a long
> time), but I don't like complexity just for the sake of it.
Even dinosaurs have to adjust to a changing environment (the real
ones never got the chance though 8)
<tomas/>
