[sclug] Question about HTML format e-mails

[Alex Butcher]

On Fri, 3 Dec 2004, Bob Franklin wrote:

> 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.

Historically, links couldn't be guaranteed to be 7-bit clean (Compuserve was
notable in this for a long time) - hence things like uuencode, MIME Base64
and so on.

> 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?

I'm not sure that Latin character sets in Unicode allow for composition of
characters (unlike with Arabic and others), which is what would be required
to do this cleanly in plain-text email.

>  - Bob

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher      Brainbench MVP for Internet Security: www.brainbench.com
Bristol, UK                      Need reliable and secure network systems?
PGP/GnuPG ID:0x271fd950                         <http://www.assursys.com/>