On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 17:31 -0600, Mike Miller wrote: > Can anyone tell me why it would be better for this message (for example) > to be expressed in *both* plain text and HTML formats? People often do > that these days but I think it is obviously not good. If that were to > become conventional, what an annoyance -- it wastes bandwidth and disk > space and causes some problems in managing email archives. To compensate > for these problems it offers no real advantages. Heh, well, I'm nominally all for proportional fonts instead of monospace, except when required. I mean, we're not talking on teletypes here. You used *this* for emphasis, when bold or italic might have been more obvious. Yes, mail clients can be set up to automatically embolden or italicize plaintext when certain patterns are seen, but that often catches other random strings, especially on a technical list where people might be discussing globbing or function names. There's also the ability to embed links rather than typing in a URL and worrying whether someone's client is going to interpret [http://somehost.com/] or (http://somehost.com/) in a way that ignores the trailing ']' or ')' (right now as I type, I see that Evolution has determined my trailing ')' is part of the URL, and it also shows some other weirdness). Then again, every method I've seen for creating URLs is error-prone in some fashon. Still, HTML mail has a lot of drawbacks. While I like proportional fonts for ease of reading, most mail clients stretch the text all the way across the viewing pane. It's not comfortable to read text that's more than about 100 characters wide, so I don't know why more programs don't try to squeeze it a bit. But, I'm sure this can be hinted at through the use of CSS and other trickery in some clients. Font size and the overuse of color are also problematic. No! Do not send me your note in tiny 7pt font! And, gah, wallpaper backgrounds. Blech. That's sooo Internet-circa-1994 or MySpace-circa-yesterday (okay, /maybe/ 2007). Speaking of MySpace, at least I haven't seen anybody on this list send base64-encoded UTF-8 HTML mail with the major headers in lowercase ('subject:', 'to:', 'from:' -- yeah, I was wondering why my procmail rules weren't working...). That's nasty, Tom. Just... Gah. Some things that have helped me learn how to format things in a nice way include learning LATeX and the LyX WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) word processor, HTML/CSS, and various wiki syntaxes. Don't say "18-point Georgia font, bold" and try to remember that every time. Say, "Heading, Level 1" and just give hints on how to display it. Unfortunately, that's a somewhat foreign concept in the land of MS Word. The free mail clients I've used include Pine, Mutt, Sylpheed (aw, I miss X-Face), Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Evolution. The costly clients I've used have been Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. I've also used Gmail a little, but not extensively. Notes and Outlook are both at the bottom of the barrel for me, and they're both very bad at converting messages to plaintext to be sent out to Internet-standard mail programs. It's a challenge to see where replies begin and end, and Outlook has a nasty habit of replacing two linebreaks with break-space-break-break-space-break. Wha? I haven't seen what new untold horrors Office 2007 will bring upon the world. Sounds like they're going more document-centric, like what Lotus Notes was supposed to be. Well, I've rambled too much. Suffice to say that I prefer Evolution, send text mail at home but do HTML mail at work (where I even top-post.. yeargh), and kinda sorta like Gmail's idea of "conversations" where I can see the messages I wrote in the history. Maybe I could just set my client to dump sent mail into my inbox and let the threading do its magic... Hmmm... -- Mike Hicks <hick0088 at tc.umn.edu> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080229/a7d94dbb/attachment.pgp