[Gllug] HTML email formatting

[Alex Hudson]

On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 15:21, David Damerell wrote:
> I'm not saying that you _don't_; just that it's not true to say that
> it would be useless without.

True. Useless for me, is what I should have said.

> Um. I find it hard to think of much, short of tables, that something
> requiring only 5 minutes to write would benefit from.

Even highlighting sections can be extremely important. Honestly!

> Tables I'll grant you; but quoting, indentation and linking? Clearly
> we can quote in plain-text email; if I wanted to indent I could; and
> if I want a link, I'll type the URL into the plain text - if you have
> a nice client, that'll be just as useful to you.

Yes, I didn't say it was impossible though: just that it's not as easy
to work with. For example, in pine you can Ctrl-J to re-justify text and
fix broken quoting. However, this breaks with some text (containing >,
for example) requiring manual fixing, and shouldn't really need to be
done anyway. Yes, you can type in a URL, but again, it's not so easy.
Especially if it's a long one: text mail should have lines no longer
than 72 characters, so if you do have a link longer than that it's
susceptible to breaking. There are lots of minor niggles like that which
just aren't present in HTML email.

> There are conventions for indicating amendments in plain text -
> awkward, but without the 'angry fruit salad' effect on the results.

Again, much harder to use though.

> >Then, there's
> >also things you can't do with text, such as italicising,
> >right-justifying, etc...
> 
> Overkill for these quick 5-minute emails, surely.
> 
> [Besides, plain text has _conventions_ for *emphasis* too.]

If I want to italicise or otherwise emphasise a whole sentance, what do
I do? _Do I do this_? _What_about_this_? I clearly can't do the second,
since again we hit the 72-character line limit, and it breaks, and more
than one quoting level and it gets really ugly. But, then the first
requires me to re-emphasise if I just chop a piece of text out of the
middle. I'd rather just highlight it, Ctrl-I, and leave it. None of the
problems I mention then affects it.

It depends on how you use email. For something like this, where it is a
communication medium, text is fine & I have nothing against that.
However, for most things I use it for at work it's most of a
collaboration tool - really, we're sending short documents back and
forth. To do all the wordprocessing you would want to, it would be a
real pain in text mode. 

Cheers,

Alex.

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