On 2012-11-25, Chris Bannister <cbannis...@slingshot.co.nz> wrote: > > With regards to mailing list posts, which is what the original post > of mine was addressing, sending HTML posts is very wasteful. They > are archived in various places on the Net, where they are stored for > ever and a day. Yeah, yeah, hard disks are cheap etc. etc. etc, but > that is not the issue¹.
"Waste" is something that in itself has no value. But formatting has value added to the presentation. So it's a stretch to label html as "waste", before even discussing the significance of it. In the context for which you attempt to make an argument about HTML being wasteful, it's quite silly considering how much waste is inherent in a mailing list. Mailing lists distribute the full body of each and every message to each and every member -- who will look at the headers and decide what to read. And yet you're concerned about the tags -- something that actually adds value? The tags present in unread messages are dwarfed by the content in unread messages. One could perhaps make a case that the HTML tags are wasteful from the angle that they're not as short as they could be. But even then you're still stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. Moreover, text is highly compressible. So if you're keen to make perfection the enemy of availability, you should be on the fringe advocating for a binary format and a scheme that distributes headers only, until specifically retreived for reading.
