Once upon a time Shawn McMahon wrote:
>
> >Hmm.. I'd have to disagree here... In my opinion, HTML should *never*
> >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
Small point: the word is 'asterisk', plural 'asterisks'.
> support for bold or italic text in straight ASCII.
>
> The purpose of email is to communicate information. When we speak, we use
> various degrees of emphasis. It's helpful in most cases to be able to
> convey this in email, and it's crucial in some cases.
>
> 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".
Ugliness is surely in the eye of the beholder.
[...]
> 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.
Sorry, but your second sentence does not either follow from or lead
logically to the previous.
> If we're going to have a markup language establish itself as an email
> feature, it'd be very helpful if it was a markup language that was in wide
> use in other Internet-related places.
Yes, "if".
> I think you'll agree that there is no markup language that is more
> associated with the Internet than HTML.
Agreed.
> HTML is a standard markup language. It's easy to implement support for it.
> HTML interpretation code exists for every platform that connects to the
> Internet. Even Microsoft and Netscape agree on HTML as a good compromise
> markup language for email.
>
>
> It really comes down to this:
>
> You're either in favor of HTML markup in email, or you're not in favor of
> email being a very rich method of communication compared to speech.
Oh really? And I say that I *am* against HTML in email and I am in
favour of email's being a rich method of communication?
>
> I don't think we should tolerate email remaining in it's outmoded old form
> when there's such an easy way to increase it's utility for
> communication.
As far as I'mn concerned, adding bloody HTML tags makes the mail
*harder* to read and certainly doesn't increase its
comprehensibililty.
> Sure, there will be idiots who insist on using colors and tiny font sizes,
> but it's trivial to ignore them and they'll grow out of it.
Oh trivial is it?
> Being opposed to HTML in email is a lot like being opposed to X-Windows.
Apart from the fact that MIT specifically ask us *not* to call it
X-Windows.... this is total and utter nonsense.
--
|Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood|
|Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to. |
|email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | |
|phone: +1 250 370 4452 | Hermann Scherchen. |
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