On 24 November 2012 00:40, Nathan Ridge wrote: > > I am regular reader of several mailing lists, some of which (such as this > one) require plain text, and some (like cdt-dev) which allow rich text. > > My experience has been that the formatting of messages on plain-text > lists is consistent across the board, while on rich-text lists you get a > mess by mixing together different formatting conventions. A prominent > example is the formatting convention used for quoting the message you're > replying to. Plain-text lists always use one convention: greater-than > signs (>) before each line of the quote, one for each level of quoting. > On rich-text lists, some messages use greater-than signs, some use a > vertical line to the left of the text, some use a different color, etc. > The result is a mess that's difficult to follow.
It also seems to be more common with rich text mails for people to start their reply inside the markup of quoted text, so the reply then appears in the same font/color/indentation as the quoted text, which puts quite a burden on the readers to disentangle the reply from the quoted text. > I think rich-text works well when everyone uses the same mail client. > For example, at a company I used to work, for everyone used Microsoft > Outlook as their mail client, and emails were sent in rich text. There > was no readability problem there because everyone used the same > formatting conventions. But everyone top-posts ... eurgh. In my experience of a few technical lists the small benefits of being able to show code snippets in a different font from text, or make conservative use of bold/italics for emphasis are not enough to warrant using rich text.
