Re: [Asrg] Introduction and another idea

At 9:09 AM -0600 6/20/03, Vernon Schryver wrote:
>As far as I can tell, all of the HTML formatting in your message
>was gratuitious and not manually selected.

In which case you would be wrong.  It was triggered by my making one 
single word bold.

>
>Note that a lot of it was incredibly bad but typical machine-generated
>HTML.  For example many of the non-breaking spaces are obnoxious (but
>hidden) noise HTML.  Or notice that <span></span> pair above.
>But as far as I can tell, the fact that MUAs generate incredibly
>bad HTML is irrelevant.

It certainly could have done a better job, but since it was Eudora, 
and the the Eudora developers pretty much despise HTML email, I 
suspect they didn't spend a lot of time trying to make it efficient. 
After all, even with all that mess--it's still better than what 
Outlook generates.

However.  The real point of my response.

You asked why, if HTML was so common, we didn't see more of it on 
this list.  My posting (as I hoped) quickly generated a perfect 
example of why technical mailing lists don't have a lot of HTML email.

At 2:36 PM -0600 6/20/03, xxx wrote:
>If whatever you said is important, I'm sure you'll send it again without
>the extraneous unreadble code.  ;-)
>
>Please don't send HTML to mailing lists.  Like any MIME attachment, HTML
>should be sent only when you know the recipients can (and will) decode it
>and make user of it.  Chances are you don't know all the recipients of a
>mailing list will be able to handle it.

Thank you to the person (who shall remain anonymous) who sent me that 
off list.  You couldn't have said it better if I'd planted you there 
:-).

-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Anti-Spam Service for your POP Account
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.

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