On Thu, 2 Apr 1998, Jules Bean wrote: > Actually, if you have a decent MIME-configured email reader, HTML mail > shouldn't give you a problem.
No offense to you personally, but this argument is also used by the more braindead Microcronies: "If you'd used decent software, you could read the Excel sheet / Powerpoint presentation / Word97 document that I've just sent you by email. It's not my fault you're not conforming to standards." A lot of people confuse "Standard" with "Convenient To Me And My Whimsy." This kind of reasoning turns well-defined and commonly accepted standards that are very well fitted to the job at hand into a silly fringe thing, without any necessity or sensible reason. Very often this is stimulated by vendors of the "enhancements", who mostly try to lure you into their tarpit of proprietary protocols. The sort that you can easily buy into, but a lot harder out of. I like to think that by nature, efficient forms of communication seek a least common multiple among communicating parties to reduce potential misunderstanding and to increase the efficiency of the effort to communicate. Only when communicating parties can agree on a specific context, it makes sense to put additional factors into the common multiple to improve efficiency of communication. Please tell me how html-mail, microsoft-word-mail and, soon in a theater near you, activeX-mail improve general communication by email on the public internet. At some companies (like mine :-( ) people will startup MS Word to write an email of three lines. On average, I get at least one powerpoint presentation every week, generally consisting of say, 3 sheets, each with one and a half sentence on it. If all of these messages were sent as three lines of plaintext, the readability of it as an email would have been much better, even for those who do like to use various office software products. Now if people would start to use the time, spent on crafting powerpoint sheets, on content instead, some of it might even have been more sensible. Cheers, Joost -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
