On 2008-07-04, at 19:03, Earle Martin wrote:
... their HTML shit.... I don't WANT to see their garbage
This attitude bemuses me whenever I encounter it; it reminds me of those people who insist that the theater is and always will be superior to the "moving pictures".
I suppose it depends on what they do with it. Generally, when I get "rich text" mail, it's more like "the Star Wars Kid" than "Star Wars".
See, the richer the media, the more skill is necessary to use it well. Given that most people seem to have trouble putting together coherent sentences, adding colors and font choices improves it not at all.
But that's not even the big problem. No, the big problem is that most people are writing their "rich text" mail with mail software that is incomprehensibly hateful. I've had to use Outlook lately, and for various reasons (like, there's embedded tables that I'm commenting on) I have to keep the message as a whole rich text, and I'm boggled. Look, over here, there's a block of text in 10 point Verdana, black. I copy it and paste it into an email message that is in 10 point Arial, blue. What it inserts is three words in Times Roman, 12 point, black, and one word in Times Roman, 8 point, green, bold, and *underlined*. When I select the whole text that I just inserted and select "Arial, 10 point", I get 3 words in "Arial, 6 point" and one word in "Arial, 6 point". I select that last word, set it to 10 point (that works), click on the "B" button to remove the bold, and it goes away. Then I click on the "U" button to remove the underline, and nothing happens. I ask someone for help, and they say that it's a hyperlink, I need to delete hyperlink. I bring up the context menu, and it's not a hyperlink... oh, no, they say, that's in Excel. Try "edit hyperlink". But it's not actually a hyperlink, and outlook pops up a little edit box suggesting I might want to make it a "mailto:"; link. So I copy part of it, and that part retains the underline.
At this point I copy the entire section I'm working on into Notepad, delete it from Outlook, and paste it back in, and that removes the magic attributes that Outlook could not eliminate.
Why Outlook hallucinated a completely different set of attributes than it originally had for the text it was inserting is beyond me. Let alone why it decided that part of it was a hyperlink... kind of... apparently it couldn't figure out what kind it was. Taking the same text, and copying it from Notepad instead of Internet Explorer [1], and everything was fine.
Given the hatefulness of the software they are working with, it is no surprise that the HTML mail they send is well described as "shit". This is not because rich text is inherently worse, nor simply because rich text is inherently harder to work with (though it is), but because the tools that they are using are so hateful that I am daily boggled by the fact that a crowd of outraged office workers has not descended on redmond, torn down the Microsoft campus such that not one brick remains upon another, and sown the ground with salt lest some other company be tempted to set up business there.
[1] Never fear, I only use it for company-internal websites that require it.
