[Gllug] Where has the modem gone

[David Damerell]

On , 21 Nov 2001, Alex Hudson wrote:
>On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 12:20, David Damerell wrote:
>>>>I hate outlook express so this is pretty important :-)
>>>I'd say. People with crappy email clients are going to scream at that
>>>html attachment....
>>Um. VM handles it quite nicely 
>><snip>
>Without going into the relative crappyness of various clients; that
>wasn't what I was talking about - I was thinking more about the ludds
>with their stoneage clients, which rarely deal with MIME, and have even
>more problems with richly formatted email. Generally the same people who
>whine about Reply-to: being set, the quoting styles of different clients
>and whether or not someone is using the correct character set encoding. 

Then I'm a luddite too. Reply-To: shouldn't be set on mailing lists;
top-quoting is demonstrably inferior; and if someone's character set
encoding is wrong, calling the receipient's client 'stoneage' is
deliberately ignoring where the broken client is.

It's not as true as it is of newsreaders, but it's still fairly often
the case that the older clients are much better than the new 'modern'
ones.

[Clients that don't handle MIME gracefully are broken, but most
text-based mail clients have perfectly good handling these days.]

>> Doesn't mean I _like_ to get that mess, so I'll still scream.
>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.

>I see email as more than souped-up SMS, I'm
>afraid, although that's not to say plain-text email doesn't have its
>place.

That place would be when you care about the content and not the
formatting. The argument that some logical markup would improve
matters is quite an attractive one - in and of itself it's true - but
unfortunately that's not what we'd get; instead, the results are the
same kind of hideousness that we get from exposing idiots to word
processors, with gratuitous physical markup for the sake of it.

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.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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