On 21 Feb 99, at 11:22, Nicolas Brouard wrote:
> I think that what we now need is a more sophisticated pine mailer which is
> able to decode HTML mail into a plain text message (like Lynx is doing it). ...
The only problem with this is that of all of the various "enhanced email"
ideas that have come along in the last 20 years or so, HTML is almost
certainly the absolute *worst*. About the only thing that'd be really
worse than HTML [and maybe not even that] would be to try "full
PostScript" for email [surely you want to receive email messages that'll
eat up your entire system for hours of CPU time to compute a Mandebrot-
set watermark behind your messages...].
HTML was a lousy standard when it was first set up [and indeed, set
document-markup back a decade], and now, as it has been hacked
mercilessly [and in various incompatible, proprietary ways] it is stuck
with a double whammy: first, it sucks as a description language... no two
browsers display HTML in quite the same way and if you're trying to do
something at all fancy it is virtually impossible to get it to come out
right, and it is rife with nonstandard extensions or extentions that one
editor handles one way and another a different way]. Second, it is
WAAAAY too complicated. Why have an email standard that includes
machinery for off-site inline inclusions [or is reading email offline one
of those "old fashioned" things, too?], or for frames, javascript,
applets, plugins, ActiveX viruses, lordknows what.
The objection to HTML [for me at least] is not that I'm a luddite, but
that HTML *sucks*. I can only hope that it'll die the same sort of death
that the winpmail.dat and friends have, and Ihopehopehope be replaced by
something reasonable and rational.
/Bernie\
--
Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Pearisburg, VA
--> Too many people, too few sheep <--
