html email

[Ethan Tira-Thompson]

Combining replies below:

> "Mike"? Who's "Mike"? :-)
Err, sorry I meant Matt (I have a friend with a similar user id whose  
name is Mike)

> Opinion? Um... I did mean "HTML *mail*" above, and since I don't think
> you're disagreeing with that, I apologize for the ambiguity.
I think we were on the same page.  My point is the "HTML mail is  
EVIL" comment is definitely a matter of opinion.  I happen to prefer  
messages which word wrap properly and support rich text.

For instance, take a look at what happened here:

>> For instance, you're right that it's non-homogenous.  But take  
>> that to
> its
>> conclusion: some people want to use lynx to view the web, that's fine
> and
>> there are ways to give them a usable experience (e.g. 'alt' tags for
>> images), but non-homogeneity isn't a good enough reason to deny the
> rest of
[...]
UGLY!!!!  You *prefer* that mess?  It just gets worse and worse and  
the thread bounces around.  Did you reply 'its' to my "For  
instance..." or is that just continuation with bad wrapping?  People  
have to work through the formatting instead of just reading the  
actual content.  This doesn't happen when things are <blockquote>'d  
in HTML mail.

A second point is that I generally deal with adults, not font-happy  
kids.  If someone thought it worth their time to apply some  
formatting to make something clear, I want to see it because they  
probably had a reason for doing so.

> Given that I meant /mail/, I think this is irrelevant, but on a  
> vaguely
> related note, I've seen plenty of illegible or outright unusable web
> pages
> because some jackass designer assumes that the entire world runs MSIE
> with
> default settings. In some cases, it turns out to be a nice but  
> ignorant
> designer that promptly corrects the problem :-), but it still happens.
> Thank
> Mozilla for Page Style->None.
Right, which is the author's problem.  So complain to the relative  
handful of sites that do stupid stuff like that, and appreciate the  
*vast majority* which are cleanly styled.  And as you point out (and  
agrees with the point I'm trying to make), there are well known work- 
arounds to strip the style of badly designed pages.

So to relate back to email, have the server bounce the messages that  
are *only* HTML email, and I still see no problem with passing  
messages that have both formats.  I don't think you're going to have  
a problem with people making their mailing list postings into myspace  
pages.  Only spam bots do that, and there are better ways to block  
them that would also prevent them from sending text-only ads.

> Oh? Funny, when I look at source, keywords are green, comments are  
> gray,
> normal text is cyan, etc, and everything has a dark blue  
> background. See
> what
> I mean? :-)
Is all black preferable to *neither* color scheme?  You can only read  
highlighting that uses your personal color set?
Even if you say 'yes' just to spite me, then just switch to the plain  
text if that's really what you believe.

> In a word, bandwidth.
It's a mailing list.  Doubling a few KB a day is still... just a few  
KB a *day*.  As for archiving/digests, just include the plain text  
version if the HTML is too difficult to process.  And it's not that  
hard to process -- I've seen plenty of mailing lists which allow the  
subscriber to choose their format in order to avoid these issues.   
This is the first which blocks HTML altogether, which why I find it  
strange.

> Ah, so now we're talking about Postscript mail?
enscript has HTML output -- see the -W flag.

> Never saw that; what editor do you use? Anyway, AFAIK KATE doesn't do
> this
> (and I *dare* you to call it a "lesser editor" :-)).
I'm using XCode, and FYI, Kate has an 'export to HTML' under the file  
menu which is almost as convenient (Kate is a good editor too, I've  
definitely made good use of it)
The also excellent SubEthaEdit also can copy with styles, or copy  
"into" raw XHTML, which is kind of a neat trick à la enscript. (can  
directly paste into a web page's source, don't have to rely on a GUI  
editor to convert the styled text)
But anyway, my point is that this is not hard to do.

-ethan

PS In a modern email reader, you will probably see a ` accent on the  
"à la" above.  But perhaps we shouldn't support other languages'  
characters because that would be non-homogenous in older consoles  
which don't support it, and english speakers don't like to see funny  
accents in their ASCII text.
I know I'm baiting there, but hopefully you see the relation?  Time  
marches on, and there are better ways to do things.