Alexander Etter wrote:
Ah I know of what you mentioned. On an GNU Emacs mailing list I was advised to avoid anything but plaintext.
It just seems so archaic. But I'm a novice and will learn why eventually.
There's a number of reasons. In no particular order, and in all cases "you" is
generic you, not you personally.
* Mastery of your tools. Are you the master of your tools, or are they the
master of you? If the writer can't turn off HTML mail in common mail clients,
there is little hope that he can control a compiler, an editor, source
control, etc. And if he *won't* turn it off, that shows laziness and
carelessness to others that reflects badly. Especially in the open source
coding community, including here, your reputation is worth more than gold.
* Code is plain text. Editors sometimes use colour and formatting to highlight
parts of the code, but fundamentally, programming is about reading and writing
code. If you need fancy fonts and formatting and dancing paperclips to get
your message across, chances are you will never be more than a mediocre
programmer.
* Mail client independence. The people you are writing to use a wide variety
of mail clients, under many different circumstances. They might be logged into
a Unix server with only a primitive command-line mail app; they might be using
mutt, or Thunderbird, or Outlook, or possibly not even reading it via mail at
all, but via a newsgroup on Usenet. All of these programs may display your
message differently. You have no control over the presentation that the user
will see -- best to make the fewest assumptions, namely, plain text, and not
rely on features which may be missing.
* Your readers may be colour blind, and your red and green lines may look
identical. Or they may be completely blind, and using a screen reader. Or they
might prefer to disable HTML emails, and avoid all the dangers and problems
with it (security vulnerabilities, privacy breaches, and the rest). Or they
might be sick and tired of straining to reading crappy emails with light blue
text on a slightly darker blue background. Either way, your formatting is
lost. Don't expect people to turn on HTML display just for you.
* Layout of code (especially Python code) is special. Your mail client may
mangle the layout. It is very common to see code posted where all indentation
is lost, or even line breaks, so everything is squashed into a single line:
def func(a, b): while b < 100: print b b += 1 print a-b
Or every line is separated by a blank line, which makes it a PITA to paste
into the interactive interpreter. Even if the reader can fix the mangling,
they shouldn't have to.
--
Steven
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