On Sat, 13 Jun 1998, Shawn McMahon wrote:
> Microsoft Outlook Express, and most other email programs that allow HTML
> formatting, put the plain-ASCII text in the main body, and attach the
> HTML-formatted version as a MIME attachment.
That's not true. They put the plain-ASCII text in another attachment to
the file, so you get an empty message with two attachments. In your
particular case, your mail client isn't even putting valid character set
information in with the attachment, which means that one must save the
message to a file, then go view it with an external program.
However, I'm glad to see that this message is encoded in a reasonable
format. :)
> >have been integrated with email. Email should always have been a text
> >only medium rather than all this colour and font crap that people are
> >putting in with it...
>
> And yet, you used asterixes as the usual crude workaround to the lack of
> support for bold or italic text in straight ASCII.
Yes, but it works, which is more than you can say for HTML-based email. :)
The problem I have is with programs that like to simply decree their
arbitrary "standards" and expect the world to deal with it. If anyone has
ever attempted to read program code on any Microsoft mail client, you'll
find that it comes out riddled with emoticons and inexplicable formatting
and looking a little bit like it's been to the Woodstock concert. Of
course, the use of HTML would actually eliminate this problem, but the
point is, it's a bad thing to try to do things that are specifically
incompatible with the standard.
> Without some form of markup language, we have to resort to crude
> workarounds such as asterixes, all-caps, and the extremely ugly "stick
> an underbar before and after".
It all works, everywhere, and it is the standard. Not a standard based on
RFC-such and such, but a standard based on tradition. On the other hand,
no standard for HTML-encoded email exists, and a large percentage of email
clients do not support it. The PC world comes from a culture of "your
system doesn't support my standard, upgrade it." Even a little bit of
this and you wind up with an environment where nothing works with anything
else. In the Unix world, however, a different attitude has always
prevailed. If you want to innovate, feel free, but please don't break
anything while you're doing it. Which one of these methods produced the
Internet?
Not that I'd be opposed to having HTML-encoding become the standard. I'm
sure that someone would come up with a system that just stripped out the
extraneous information or replaced it with the *'s and _'s that we all
know so well. The presence of HTML does not necessarily mean that we all
have to actually look at the awful pinks, yellows, and 3 point fonts that
seem to saturate the mailboxes of anyone that's ever been forced to spend
time on AOL. It just means that we need a couple of extra features from
our favorite mail client.
> Unfortunately, you'll find that people misinterpret these. I have a
Only the ones who are both stupid and ignorant.
> A tremendous number of people agree that there should be some kind of
> markup language established as a standard for email. Every commercial
> email package supports one or more markup methods.
Which in the grandest traditions of Microsoft and commercial software in
general are all completely incompatible with one another. In fact if you
should feed a message created with one of these programs into a different
program by mistake, your computer will catch fire, and it will void your
warranty.
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