On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:36:06 -0700, Linda W <v...@tlinx.org> wrote: > Even in college, when others were still using typewriters and dot matrix > printers, I was using troff to generate my papers for classes -- I > couldn't make it work in plain text. You may not get this, but I really > have major problems formatting things in plain text. Hyperlinks? > forget it. Alternate fonts or tables? nearly impossible. Sorry, but > you are wrong. I did choose and DID include a plain text copy. But the > structure it came up is about as well as I've done in the past.
To a certain extent I can sympathise. I'd love a proper way to format mail messages the way I format messages on paper. However, HTML is about the worst possible way of doing it. It was a quick and stupid solution to a problem nobody knew they had. The problem with HTML for mail formatting is that it's designed for a completely different environment. Using it for mail means that any mail client that wants to display mail in anything like a readable form needs to have what is essentially a complete web browser built in. That wasn't too hard fifteen years ago when HTML was a small and easily-parsed language, but now, with CSS included, it means that for a typical MUA the code needed to handle the display can be a thousand times as large as the code needed to actually send and receive mail. I don't know how anyone can consider that reasonable. Or sane. And it gets worse. Even among fully-fledged web browsers there's a substantial failure to implement standards in their entirety. MUAs have no chance. The result is that when you oh-so-carefully format up your mail there isn't a hope in hell that everyone receiving it will see what you intended. If they're using the same mail client as you are - and that means the same version, not just the same brand - then there's a pretty good chance they'll see what you want them to see. Otherwise, forget it. If you're lucky what they get might still be readable, but you'd be foolish to put money on it. What's the point of formatted mail that gives you less control over what the recipient sees than plain text does? I think we really do need a simple and light-weight mechanism for formatting mail: light enough that all mail clients can implement it, simple enough that all mail clients can implement it in the same way. HTML is not such a mechanism. Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle. The authors of email clients have a vested interest in having emails sent by their programs display best in their programs, and the authors of formatted messages have an attitude of "it works for me and if it doesn't for you that's just tough". So I can confidently predict that ten, twenty, a hundred years from now formatted email will still be a complete mess, and it'll still true that the only way to send someone a message and be confident that it'll appear exactly how you intend is to send it on paper. -- Matthew Winn --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message from the "vim_use" maillist. For more information, visit http://www.vim.org/maillist.php -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
