Alan S Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Don't we all have a responsibility to show them that their desire to use
> HTML in e-mail is largely a brainwashing attempt by the commercial
> element of the Internet in order to present more dynamic ad
> presentations? We all understand that HTML in e-mail does not in any
> way improve the actual content of the message.
But as much as traditionalists might like this to be the case (and I
definitely count myself in that category), it really isn't entirely true.
I had a very enlightening conversation with a friend of mine a while back,
who's also a technical person but in addition was an English major and is
a semi-professional writer. Turns out he uses text/enriched extensively.
I gave him the standard reaction, and he nodded understanding, but then
pointed out that when you're sending drafts of something back and forth
with a co-writer, having strikeout and annotations in different colors
really is invaluable and hard to do any other way.
Sure, I'd probably find some plain text way of marking such things up,
such as characters in the margin, but I have tools available like emacs
with its rectangular editing mode that lets me do things like that with a
great deal more ease than 95% of the e-mail-using population. And a pure
text markup really is somewhat inferior to being able to mark things with
color. (The amount of semantic information that can be communicated with
color is truly staggering and hard to appreciate until you've experimented
with it; I never thought it was worth much until I started playing with
and customizing color ls, and now not having color noticeably slows down
my ability to navigate directories or parse my e-mail which Gnus nicely
colorizes for me.)
And the alternative, in this case for that sort of application, isn't to
use plain text for most people. It's to send MS Word attachments instead.
Y'know, I really prefer text/enriched or text/html over that.
Now, I fully agree that the vast majority of people using HTML or other
markup languages aren't using them anywhere near as intelligently as my
friend. My mail reader displays HTML, and for the most part all that
means is that spam looks even more incredibly ugly than it did before (if
you think their text is bad, you haven't seen anything until you've seen
the blue text on orange backgrounds). But occasionally someone does use
it right, and then it's actually fairly nice and arguably useful.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
