On Sun, Nov 25, 2012 at 07:14:45PM +0000, Tony's unattended mail wrote: > 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.
I don't see how an html email adds any value whatsoever to a post on a software support mailing list. Au contraire, it is a PITA having to deal with them. > 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. With good trimming practice that, shouldn't be too much of a problem. Remember, the whole point of the support mailing list's raison d'etre is to provide support, so I think you are clutching at straws when you start along that line. > the tags -- something that actually adds value? The tags present in > unread messages are dwarfed by the content in unread messages. You'll never convince me that an HTML message adds value, sorry. > 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. Dealing with waste in web pages, is an entirely, completely different topic and no relevance here. I'm not even going to start on the crap code that Frontpage produces ... cough, cough, sorry. > 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. Some archives have gzipped monthly downloads, which is a good idea. With regards to a binary format, I'm not sure if you are joking or not, but It might be an interesting idea to force everyone to have a pgp key compress every post and sign it, and if the signature doesn't verify, reject it? Then again, if spammers managed to get hold of people's secret keys, all hell would break loose. No on second thoughts scrap that. -- "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." --- Malcolm X
