[Gllug] Where has the modem gone

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Wed Nov 21 14:50:57 UTC 2001


On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 14:15, David Damerell wrote:
> Then I'm a luddite too.

Then we're agreed ;)

> >aren't so bad; but even moderately complex business email would be
> >useless in non-html format.
> 
> That's just not true; I work for a very large corporate, and only the
> marketing and PR weasels feel the need to generate HTML email.

Not really. I use tables, bullet points and colouring extremely
regularly, but I suppose it depends who you work for and what work you
do.
 
> If there was some way to get some minimal logical markup into email
> instead of plain text, I'd be keen on it myself; but, sadly, HTML
> isn't it.

Again, it must depend on who you work with. Email is extremely good as a
fast communication medium - most of my emails are written within five
minutes - and in the environment, marking-up for the sake of prettiness
isn't done. Marking-up for the sake of making an email readable, usable
and useful is.

The key uses I have for HTML email are quoting, tables, identation,
linking, etc., all of which have text parallels that are readable but
completely unusable - uncopyable, or unreplyable, etc. Being able to
colour is important - I can get sent drafts, make amendments, highlight
them, etc., and send it back. 

Being able to cut-and-paste sensibly with a wordprocessor is also
extremely important, and again, I can't do that with text. Then, there's
also things you can't do with text, such as italicising,
right-justifying, etc...

Cheers,

Alex.

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