List, I've been considering Richard Hake's complaints about html, graphics, etc., in messages. Believe it or not, I have some sympathy for his views (otherwise I wouldn't clean up my html markup or strive to make images be as low-KB as I can with my amateur means). This sympathy developed and hardened in the course of work experience some years ago at a corporation whose internal branding requirements during the middle part of my time there were dreamt up by some PC-semiliterate folks quite separately from awareness about kilobytes, server capacity, and mass-pho'py stickiness. I've also noticed that the Lyris server adds some sort of coding, with a lot of "20"s & equality signs, which makes my html messages harder to read in the message source as some people try to do. So I'm willling to take a few ameliorative steps.
I am very glad that Joe maintains a policy of allowing html & images etc., but, since I've seemed to be the most frequent user of the graphic capabilities, I'm willing to send a plaintext version to those who prefer it, with links to the graphics which I'll put at some free image-hosting service like imageshack.us or Flickr. I do not believe that listers generally should be required to do this, but again, I'm currently the lister making the most frequent use of graphic capabilities and I happen to find it easy to take the described measures. I'll use html only when I'm including tables or other graphics. So when you see html from me, you'll know that you can just delete it because I'm sending you a plaintext version if--if--if you've let me know (off-list) that that's what you prefer. Those who already simply delete any message at all from me don't need to change their behavior at all, of course, and they, too, have at least some of my sympathy! Actually, I don't expect to hear from anybody about this, but I could be wrong, so I thought that I should at least offer. It is already the case that my html posts to peirce-l can be converted to plaintext without loss of info as to italicization, etc., and I generally arrange it so that the paragraphs are separated into email "divisions" (with the "DIV" tags) rather than using the simple "breaks" (with the "BR" tags) which some modes (I forget which) of plaintext conversion lose. I do recommend that any respondents delete whatever is unneeded in the response, including my graphics if they're irrelevant. I don't know how every email program works, but in the Microsoft ones, you can convert to plaintext by clicking on Format, Plain Text. MS Outlook Express automatically deletes images in the textbody in conversion to plain text; some other email programs seem to allow incorporation of images in the supposedly plaintext (or "unformatted") mode. Best, Ben Udell [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
