On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Luke Burton wrote:
> 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.
If people want to express themselves to their friends, and their friends
don't mind receiving HTML in their inboxes, then that's fine. However, if
someone chooses to express themselves in public, then they're going to
raise a lot of ire if they don't adhere to common standards. And if
they're communicating privately to someone that they don't know, then
they'd be advised to be rather conservative when they're taking a guess at
the "standards" that must be adhered to in order to not cause annoyance.
If I'm sending someone a hypothetical letter, I won't print it out in
red text on a green background unless I know for a fact that the recipient
isn't red-green colour blind. I say hypothetical because I'd never want to
send such a coloured letter to anyone - seems pretty pointless to me :)
-- Andrew Francis locust@iinet.net.au
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 03:10:04 EST