John D. Hardin wrote:
On Tue, 27 Jun 2006, Kelson wrote:
Until something
comes along that (a) handles all the formatting that people want to be
able to do, including adding silly backgrounds, changing the font or
color for no reason,
Why in the world do we need to support/encourage *that* nonsense?
Because people will find ways to do it anyway, like sending Microsoft
Word documents or PDF files.
Better to come up with something that satisfies the demand, but isn't as
easy to exploit for nefarious purposes (tracking, malware delivery,
obfuscation) as HTML is, than leave things as a choice between HTML and
plain text.
There are plenty of options for simple markup languages more limited in
their potential for abuse (unless you consider formatting itself an
abuse) -- Wiki code, or BBcode, or the rich-text format that Eudora
generates -- just none of them have the critical mass among email
clients (I don't think anything will display formatted Wiki or BBCode,
for instance) to be worth using except in small circles.
--
Kelson Vibber
SpeedGate Communications <www.speed.net>
