On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 08:20:06PM -0400, Patrick Shanahan wrote: > The *real* problem is that email is a "text" function and all the fancy > formatting is irrelevant. Sentence structure,tables and paragraphs > suffice. And all the jump-thru-hoops to present some fancy display > disappear.
That is simply false. Typesetters have been using italics, bold face, underlining, etc. to indicate emphasis, or other similar changes of context, since as early as the 15th century, if not earlier--over 500 years ago. Since then, these formatting devices have come to be used in the overwhelming majority of printed materials to convey, among other things, hints about the tone of a passage, or about important key words or concepts, which unformatted text alone simply can not... at least not in a professional manner. It is, IMO, absolutely unforgivable at this date that an e-mail client not have a way to provide the same, particularly since there are absolutely zero technological reasons why one should be unable to do so. And yes, even on terminal-based mail readers such as Mutt--it is completely possible to render text as bold, italics, underlined, colored, etc. on every modern terminal and/or emulator I'm aware of (and many that are not so modern). What I would grant is that the standard used to provide this (HTML) is not ideal; however it is what is used, universally (excepting perhaps some small percentage of fringe users who insist on sticking to failed standards like RTF). As such, any mailer, such as Mutt, which fails to provide a reasonable means of creating, displaying, and responding to such correspondence is incomplete, and has, at least in part, failed at its job. This is one important way in which the "hand some functionality off to another program" model falls down. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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