"Alan S. Harrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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...
I don't think we "all have a responsibility" to teach such a thing, even if
we believe it ourselves, which the responses (temperate and intemperate) to
this thread demonstrate is not universally the case.
Some list managers may adopt this as a personal mission and persevere with
it, despite the fact that an increasing pie-slice of readers have no idea
what they're talking about or why they should waste their time trying to
comply. But most list managers, from what I have seen, are more interested
in serving their underlying topic and community, e.g. vintage BMW owners or
neutron star researchers, with a minimum of headache and a maximum of member
satisfaction, than in waging these kinds of insider wars. (An unfortunate
side effect of "meta discussion syndrome" is that meta-lists like this one
tend disproportionately to attract those who DO have the energy to moonlight
as MIMEWar commandos. If there were a truly representative way to canvass
the working cohort of list admins out there in the world, some flame threads
that look important here now would shrink to the size of styrofoam packing
peanuts.)
HTML mail may be a relatively recent development, but styled text, more
generally, has been around for a while, and poses most of the same issues of
size, incomprehensibility, and misuse. At least the HTML revolution has
made picking through a digest full of RTF curlies or NROFF dotwords a
relatively rare occurence!
If you give message authors a style toolbar for bold, italic, red, green
etc, they WILL tend to use it, and turn a deaf ear to fussbudget preachments
that they "don't really need it."
That's why I'd rather just strip it out. 95% of posters will NEVER KNOW
that it was done anyway.
One annoying thing that DEMIME and Lynx-ing doesn't address is when people,
even in otherwise plain text messages, can't resist saying
I put up the picture of the gooney bird on <A HREF="mysite.com">my site</A>
instead of just writing the URL in plain text where smart mailers can pick
it up, and dumb printers and message strippers can preserve it for readers
to click or type in.
