On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 8:02 AM, Dale <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Stroller wrote: >> >> I've been wondering for a while why no alternative has been proposed. >> HTML was originally considered poor because it wasted bandwidth, HTML >> messages being *at least* twice the size of the plain text, but often >> several times as large. I wonder if console-based mail-readers were >> late in adopting it for that reason, and it gained additional >> unpopularity amongst programmers & the technorati as a consequence. >> >> Nowadays HTML is bad principally because it imposes fonts upon the >> reader. I know what size my monitor is & at what size my mail program >> should render text. [...] >> I have also found that clients appear inconsistent about how they >> apply quoting to HTML messages. At least often if I reply to an HTML >> message and change it to plain text then the quoted message magically >> looses a level of quoting. Typically I change to plain-text like this >> because I've copied & pasted a single sentence out of the quoted >> section and it comes out into my own paragraph as blue, the wrong size >> and an inconsistent font - this is another grip about HTML. > I guess my main point was this. Some mailing list people have some set > ups that may not work right in certain situations. As I have said, some > here are using older mail readers that don't do well, if display at all, > html messages. That's what I was told when I first joined here. I also > know from being here a long time that if a person does something silly, > like sending a 2Mb email or sending HTML that they can't read, they get > sent to the dust bin. Also, some people have replied from cell phones > or live in countries that charge by the amount of data. The difference > between html and text on a list this busy can be a lot. In general, html email is mostly a "solution" in search of a problem, and it ends up causing trouble and being overall worse than the simple, efficient, easy, working, universally adopted technology that preceded it. Besides all the problems already listed in this discussion, html email facilitates malware, web bugs, phishing, spam, and incompatibility (besides the people who use HTML-incapable email clients, there are email clients that don't render HTML email well (it is more common then you think), not to mention that the HTML email itself is often broken).
And of the HTML emails, a tiny minority actually make something useful of HTML, while the rest is either deliberately harmful or has a lot of "fancy" formating that looks it was created by a teenager. Besides looking horrible, they are often harder to read. As for the guy who suggested a form of "sanitized HTML for email", maybe you would like "enriched text" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_text -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
