On Fri, 17 Aug 2001 hartr@redhat.com wrote:
> *Bing* re-read my message - I clearly say there are many people using
> mail clients that do not render html AT ALL.
Ahh yes. I had another post crosswired in my head.
> The standard for email is plain text - html just clutters up text and
> makes it unreadable (frequently even by HTML capable clients). Then
> there's the security issues that have been raised.
There's no reason why text based readers can't be configured to strip out
HTML markup at the user's request.
The situation of incompatible HTML capable mail clients would be mitigated
if some simplified standard was agreed upon for markup in e-mails. There
have been a few mentions of it in this thread. We don't really need (and
probably shouldn't have) javascript and applet tags. Security is made an
issue through poor implementation, not through the sheer fact that the
mail is non-plaintext.
> I am *so* glad I live on Linux and use a graphical, but NON-HTML capable
> mail client (Ratatosk).
Never heard of Ratatosk ... I'll google it later. I'm usually in Pine, and
occasionally in Mozilla if I'm feeling like it'll be stable.
And the second mail:
> Seems to me I can create tables, bullet points etc quite easily in
> standard ASCII text (so easily that I don't see much point in
> demonstrating - try investigating the 'tab' key and thinking about uses
> of the asterisk and such as a bullet).
What an innovative thought. I'll try that sometime.
> I see no capability in html formatted email that is not an 'nice to
> have' rather than a 'must have' in terms of communication. As an
> engineer, using html in email therefore sounds rather more like a bad
> idea that a good one (based on an application of the KISS principle).
Here's the problem. E-mail isn't the provence of engineers and programmers
anymore. E-mail might just seem like a communication method for you, but
but to the *millions* of other internet users it can be a tool for self
expression. Part of which is changing the appearance of the messages.
And products that facilitate that will be popular. Hence they will be made
and sold, whether the engineers and internet purists of the world like it
or not.
It's time to realise that users do want formatted e-mail, and we (as
developers) should do whatever we can to facilitate their need. It can be
arranged such that it doesn't annoy us too much (eg. stripping html tags
automatically), but it seems that people are more inclined to side either
for-HTML or against-HTML, rather than search for any middle ground.
I think that rather than letting HTML run wild, we should adopt it and
restrain its implementation through a suitable standard that balances the
needs/wants of e-mails users against the problems that a unrestricted or
poor implementation causes.
Regards,
Luke.
Luke Burton
| <- You must be smarter than this stick to ride the Internet
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