Myself wrote: >> If you're really interested you can do a search on google groups, >> this argument has been beaten to death many times. It basically comes >> down to that fact that plain text is far more accessible to a large >> variety of email and usenet clients. You can't even ensure a webpage >> will look the same in different browsers, how on earth can you be >> sure it'll look fine in different HTML aware email/news clients? > > OK following this logic. If that is true and that substantiates the > case then all webpages should be plain text.
Absolute rubbish. The web is based upon hypertext, i.e. HTML, so plain text wouldn't work. Usenet on the other hand is a plain text medium. You're also ignoring all the work that goes into making sure that webpages do work on different browsers, you can't go through the same process for a missive sent to usenet. Plain text web clients (i.e. lynx) understand hypertext, plain text news/mail clients do not. >> >> I'm sure you'll find it easy to explain why you feel unable to >> communicate in plain text and what rich text provides that you can't >> communicate already with plain text. Why is it so important that >> everyone view your message with a certain font, certain background >> colour and font size? > > It communicates more and more easily. Are you seriously arguing > against rich text? Never used a word processor? Never read a magazine > or a newspaper? Are you claiming that English isn't a valid communication medium? How does rich text communicate more easily? Are you unable to express yourself without brightly coloured fonts? Magazines, Newspapers and books have nothing to do with rich text, and are completely irrelevant to what you are talking about here. They have control over the output and how people access their material, with usenet you have no control. Only etiquette put into place to make everyone's lives more easier, it's in place and it works. You've yet to do anything to obfuscate the issue, and still haven't come up with any reasons why your messages would benefit from rich text formatting. If your messages are that important you'd be better off setting up a web page. Rich text via email just doesn't work. If it did you could prove it by doing a nice newpaper style layout with a heading and three columns of text illustrated by a nice photograph positioned in the centre of the left column. Should only take a few minutes. We're sending plain text messages back and forth, not exchanging newspapers. ian.
