From: Dave C. <djc@???>
> I hope this doesnt sound like a "me too", but I have to agree with Phil
> here.
If the topic is "is HTML right for email?" your point, while quite valid and
doubtless earning lots of support (myself included), is off-topic:
[snipping]
> and they send it in a
proprietary word processor or
spreadsheet format,
assumes everyone has MS-Word or
MS-Excel, or
reads their mail with an MSIE embedded application.
Then the total non-sequitur:
> HTML is for the web - not email.
HTML is an IETF-ratified standard and is integrable into the mail domain
through documented, widely implemented and publically and freely available
formats and content-types. None of the things you're talking about has
*anything* to do with HTML at all.
> Philip Hazel wrote:
> > 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 read my email using Pine on Unix. I now never bother to look
> > at gratuitous attachments in HTML (or anything else, for that matter).
> > [It's different if the message says "here's an attached
> > document/webpage/binary for your attention".]
> >
> > 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.
I don't think you'd find much disagreement from anyone here on those points.
Mis-, gratuitous, needless or over-complex use of technology is something any
discerning & conscientious viewer would dislike!
My original comment was "could see *no* use for HTML or non-ASCII at all"
(emphasis added). If you wanted some feedback on your color scheme for a
client, how would you do that with ASCII? If you wanted to demonstrate your
typography design portfolio over email, how would you do that with ASCII? If
you wanted to mix fixed and proportionally spaced text (e.g. annotated
code listing), how would you do that with ASCII?
The point is that there are some not just valid but otherwise impossible uses
for HTML in email. I might get flamed for this but it's the technical folk's
reluctance to appreciate presentation as a form of expression or content that
often gets in the way of seeing those uses (IME).
Having said all that, if email clients didn't send HTML (or worse some
hideous XML-wannabe) by default and so caused the user to make a decision and
actually manually request it each time the world would definitely be a better
place :-)
Paul
PS Proponents of the "I use this MUA and it sucks reading HTML" argument
could take a look at mutt: it does a fantastic job of handling MIME.
http://www.mutt.org/
> >
> >
> > --
> > Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
> > ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
