> It's not that they *cannot* follow an arbitrary rule. It is that the > rule bears no relation with the quality of their work, so they see it > as an artificial roadblock which merely irritates them. Add enough > irritants and they may decide to take their contributions elsewhere.
Coding standards are "arbitrary" rules. For the vast majority of coding standards, you can't make a technical argument for or against them. We all agree to use the same standard because we understand that uniformity is important. Similarly for text-only vs. "rich text". You may argue that there's no compatibility issue, but I disagree. As was pointed out upthread, when people use "rich text", they often start to use colors or other mechanisms to express themselves, which can now be dependent on the rendering agent used to read the email. Requiring people to express themselves using only words seems to me to encourage the sorts of discipline that we require in contributors.
