On Tuesday, April 10, 2001, at 10:26 PM, J C Lawrence wrote:
> Long term handling? I don't know. I suspect that I may just
> curmudge and flatly mandate text/plain with the ruling that if you
> want to participate on my lists you'll have to adapt.
and the problem, of course, is that they care more for what they want
and not for what's good for them. So you can play doctor all you want
and tell them to eat their veggies for their own good, and next thing
you know, they'll all be down in McDonalds eating burgers and not in
your place any more.
It's a generational issue -- newer users don't care that us older pharts
prefer plain text, or that we think it's better, or that we know it's
safer. And if us old pharts don't adapt, the new generations will just
ignore us, cut us out of the loop and do waht they want without us. It's
happened before on the net, it'll happen again, and if you refuse to
adapt, you'll find yourself managing lists for increasingly smaller
numbers of like-minded old pharts, until the thing looks like a
retirement home, when down the road, the disco is rattling windows a
block away as they party without you...
To me, the issue is not how to convince them to give up HTML, because
I'll lose that fight -- but how to adapt to giving them what they want
in a way that's as safe as can be done, because someone's gonna do it if
I don't, and that someone's likely to not care nearly as much about the
issues we care about, and I think it's compromise at times because the
alternative is losing control to someone who isn't going to worry about
the compromises at all.
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
How about never? Is never good for you?
