-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Frampton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sunday, June 14, 1998 9:35 AM
Subject: Re: HTML-formatted mail
>Lowest common denominator. X-Windows doesn't work very well on a 386 SX
>with 2 Mb of RAM now, does it. Yet Linux in console mode works fairly
>adequately. It may be the only thing a user in Indonesia has to play
>with.
But a text-based email program can easily be coded to deal with rich text in
a logical manner.
Whether that means using brightness, reverse text, and possibly built-in
underlining support, or perhaps just stripping the tags, it's not difficult
programming.
And that 386SX with 2Mb of RAM supports not only these features, but color
as well.
I used to read my email (Fidonet, not Internet, I was using Pine for
Internet email in those days) on a 386SX with 4Mb of RAM. My email client
supported colored text, as well as other gadgets and gizmos of text, using a
standard (ANSI). However, the lack of a kludge like MIME's ability to
include an unformatted main-body version of the message made this text
annoying to a lot of people. The fight is pretty much over, however,
because all the email readers eventually came to support ANSI controls.
It's not as useful as HTML, however, because it was designed for a world
where there wasn't "bold" or "italic" as such.
This exact same fight was fought long ago when people started using
lowercase letters in their email on the BBSes. A vocal minority bitched
about it because uppercase-only was the "lowest common denominator".
Fortunately, the Internet never had to go through that fight. It was
bloody. The most fun part about it was the fact that some of the people
bitching about the use of lowercase were responding to messages written in
lowercase.
Just like many of the people bitching about HTML now are responding to
messages written in HTML.
So go ahead and gripe all you like, folks; but please send my copies to
/dev/null. And feel free to do the same with any messages that have HTML
tags in them; I have no emotional investment in having you read them. If
you don't think you'll benefit from them, that's your opinion and you're
welcome to it.
Meanwhile, I'll read them, because I can. I'll get more information than
you do. Whether it's useful information or not is something you'll never
know, because you aren't reading them.
--
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