On Thu, 2003-12-04 at 16:23, Steve Bell wrote: > Are not most geeks on broadband now... Well, a majority of you anyway? The size of HTML messages is only one problem, even if the majority of geeks were on broadband.
My main dislike of HTML messages is that they look too good. Ok, that sounds strange, but bare with me. Email is often sent quickly and without too much thought --- it is the nature of the beast. If everything is typeset beautifully then it appears as if a lot of effort has gone into the message, which usually not the case. People more readily miss-interpret the offhanded remarks and flam-wars start. If, on the other-hand, the message is displayed using a monospace font, such as FreeMono [1] then it looks more rough and ready. However, that is my taste. Of more concern is the lack of accessibility caused by poorly formatted HTML. Often the rendered HTML appears too small (such as Mike's earlier message)[2], uses colours that is hard to see, and otherwise avoids *structured* markup. > It's like those teachers who last century, refused to let students use > a ballpoint pen, because they would forget how to use an inkwell. I still use a fountain pen to write letters on dead trees. It looks better... [1] http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freefont/ [2] If you were ever wondering, the small text-size in HTML that is produced on Windows is a product of Windows miss-reporting the screen resolution as 96dpi, when it is actually 72dpi. This causes 10pt text appears too large on Windows so they use 9pt type. Unfortunately for everyone else (MacOS, X11, BeOS, Symbian...) the text appears too small, so we have to scale it up by 120% to get text that is readable. The easiest way around this is not to use absolute numbers to specify font-sizes in HTML. Use the "small", "normal", "large" font-sizes in CSS and all will be right on any platform. -- Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
