On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Mike Hicks wrote: > 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. But monospace is clearly better whenever you try to lay something out in columns, or you type out a little flow chart or graph. When is proportional better? The answer is that it offers almost no advantage. > You used *this* for emphasis, when bold or italic might have been more > obvious. Barely. It would add 5 characters to change "**" into "<b></b>" but that is just the start of the waste -- after that your program will probably add all sorts of crap into the file. By the time you've made the full transition from plain text to some braindead HTML document, your change from "**" into "<b></b>" might cost you several thousand characters. And do you really think that anyone won't know what *this* means? > 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. That is a minor advantage of HTML, but I just avoid trouble by putting URLs on their own line like this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html ...in my messages. I think that makes it very easy to copy the URL if it wasn't made clickable by the receiving MUA. Putting the URL in parentheses or brackets, or adding a period at the end of it is always an unnecessarily risky thing to do. > Still, HTML mail has a lot of drawbacks. Now you're talking! ;-) Seriously, HTML mail is a good thing if used appropriately and written decently. I'm not really against it. I'm just against abusing it. Mike