> > 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.
>
> We disagree on this point, then. While rich-text can be abused, it is
> not my experience that people do abuse it to the point of making their
> postings illegible. The markings you see commonly used are monospace
> font alterations, bolding and lists. I have noticed no correlation
> between the ability to use a markup language and quality of
> contributions.
I am regular reader of several mailing lists, some of which (such as this
one) require plain text, and some (like cdt-dev) which allow rich text.
My experience has been that the formatting of messages on plain-text
lists is consistent across the board, while on rich-text lists you get a
mess by mixing together different formatting conventions. A prominent
example is the formatting convention used for quoting the message you're
replying to. Plain-text lists always use one convention: greater-than
signs (>) before each line of the quote, one for each level of quoting.
On rich-text lists, some messages use greater-than signs, some use a
vertical line to the left of the text, some use a different color, etc.
The result is a mess that's difficult to follow.
I think rich-text works well when everyone uses the same mail client.
For example, at a company I used to work, for everyone used Microsoft
Outlook as their mail client, and emails were sent in rich text. There
was no readability problem there because everyone used the same
formatting conventions.
However, requiring that everyone that posts to a public mailing list
use the same mail client is even more restrictive than requiring that
they use plain text. The only other way to ensure consistency of
formatting conventions is to use the lowest common denominator between
mail clients, which is plain text.
Regards,
Nate
