OK, I’m going to play the triple-jerk who (1) tries to be liked by
agreeing with everybody, (2) thinks that what he wants is all
everybody should need and (3) suggests so many options that the
preferences window will require a 30" monitor (do you write 30" or
30”?).
I give John C. Welch full license (as if he needed it) to break me to
pieces with all the profanity he wants. The others are only allowed to
respectfully disagree, and it’s better if, doing so, they agree with
John. (OK, quadruple-jerk who’s also an ass-kisser.)
Also, Caio has been pretty silent lately and I miss his Bibles.
Reading messages
I prefer reading all messages in the same font, which is currently
Monaco 10, without anti-aliasing (although I’m typing this in Gill
Sans 14 because I want to try styled text for a change and Mail won’t
let me use bold with Monaco). It’s probably my OCD but every time I
get an HTML message with another font specified it takes me a couple
of seconds to get used to it and it disturbs me a bit.
I tried using Mail’s hidden preference to prefer the plain text
alternative, but it has the unfortunate side effect of making
attachments disappear from some messages, that’s not a viable option
(but it’s a hidden preference so I can’t complain). If it didn’t do
this, though, I’d use it, fully cognizant of the risk of losing some
piece of information by disregarding the styling and prepared to
switch to the HTML version of a message when in doubt. It’s a
responsibility I’m willing to take to satisfy my little font caprice.
My preferred default view (what I would set as default, not what the
mail client should do by default), though, would be ‘degraded HTML’,
as you might call it. Here the font and size of the original message
would be discarded, replaced by my preferred font at my preferred
size, but bold, italic, colour (except pink ;-) and links would be
preserved. I don’t know about alignment and lists, I don’t receive
many messages with them. Also, I’m surely forgetting something. Again,
I’d willingly live with the risk of the message being fucked-up in
case I override a monospace font with a proportional font, etc.
My dream e-mail client would then allow me to choose what I want to
override in this special view (maybe simply with a user stylesheet).
It would also make it easy to cycle between this view and the original
message, the plain text alternative if present, the RAW message source
and maybe a plain text version generated from the HTML like Mailsmith
did, which has been discussed on the list.
But the default should be to render HTML as sent, of course. People
expect it and there’s no valid reason to take it away from them or to
tamper with their messages on displaying them.
For Letters, which last time I checked was not defined as Olivier’s
dream e-mail client, I’d be pretty happy with HTML rendering, plain
text alternative, RAW source and maybe plain text generated from HTML,
with the option to set the default view. (I would then fork it to
implement my degraded HTML view for my personal use.)
Composing messages
On the principle that you shouldn’t do to others what you wouldn’t
want done to you, I almost always send plain text messages, which
should display in the recipient’s preferred font. Sometimes, though, I
find it limiting and switch to styled text, mostly for bold, italic,
colour and also inline attachments, mainly images. What bothers me in
Mail is the lack of strike-through text.
Most of the time, though, I don’t think I’m doing anything that would
require me to force my font on the recipient. So unless I explicitly
change the font of part or all of the message while composing it, I’d
find it normal to send it without a font specified. That’s what Mail
does, if I’m not mistaken. I wrote this rich text message in Gill Sans
but it should display in your preferred message font.
If I sent code snippets or aligned some data using spaces, though, I’d
switch those parts of the message to a monospace font and then the
font specification would be present in the HTML, either just for the
parts where I changed the font—that’s what Mail does, apparently
(which could lead to strange results in some situations)—or for the
entire message. Here’s the picture of a boat, in a monospace font:
/|\
/_|_\
____|____
~~\_o_o_o_/~~
Replying
I’m not really sure what my dream e-mail client should do when
replying to an HTML message that it displays in the ‘degraded HTML’
view. I haven’t thought it through yet. Depends on whether it’s set
to replay in the original form or default compose format. Maybe I
would like to compose in HTML with the degraded version quoted. But
it’s not worth discussing because Letters won’t have this view.
There. Hope there’s a tad of reason in this. I’m not trying to impose
anything, though (as if I could). I’m confident that the Letters team
will settle on something reasonable. And if it’s not the case then
it’s likely there will be far worse problems that will hamper
development.
Ö.
P.S.: Here’s a closing parenthese for those who mistakenly believe the
ones in emoticons don’t count when balancing: )_______________________________________________
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