[sclug] Question about HTML format e-mails

[Bob Franklin]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Neil Owens wrote:

> I'm curious about the utter contempt (I think this is correct) of HTML 
> format e-mail in the Linux community.

I used to get more annoyed about it than I do now, since I 'still' use 
PINE (with good reason - that I have mentioned before).  However, PINE now 
has a simple HTML renderer which strips out the tags and honours some 
basic ones.  It still doesn't render things particularly well, but it does 
let me read the text.


I've seen this topic done to death on other email lists / bulletin boards 
/ web boards and there are lot of people arguing that there's no 
particular reason why the body part of text has to be in plain 7-bit ASCII 
text.  As the world is moving forward [point of opinion!], why should 
people be restricted to plain ASCII text?  People are used to using 
highlighting, fonts, tables and so on in word processor documents; why 
can't they in emails?

That said, all the points about bandwidth are definitely agreed on - I 
often download my email over a crummy GSM HSCSD link and waiting for a 
pile of nonsense to download and get 2 lines of text is very annoying. 
[The worst culprits are, of course, people using Word as their email 
composer.]


One of the more fun things about all this seems to be Outlook [+ 
Express]'s inability to cope with a message that has plain text and an 
HTML attachment - I'm told it will show the HTML and hide the text from 
you.  That's probably been fixed by now, though.  Hopefully.

   - Bob


-- 
  Bob Franklin <r.c.franklin at reading.ac.uk>          +44 (0)118 378 7147
  Systems and Communications, IT Services, The University of Reading, UK