On Friday 05 January 2007 04:33, Joachim Schrod wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Thursday 04 January 2007 22:31, Mike McMullin wrote:
...
Please don't ever send someone or anyone you might like, HTML e-mail.
Why not? Typographic variation is an age-old aspect of textual expression. There's no good reason to eschew it. Why should we be stuck in the 1970s when it comes to written, on-line communication?
Because HTML are not readable in digests, mixed with plain text.
Fine. I'm not advocating it for every communication or in all venues.
Because people writing HTML email makes assumptions about the facilities available at the receiver -- namely, that the typographical variation can be seen there. This means that the introduction "my comments are in red" are not meaningful if I read that email in a terminal window over a slow GPRS connection. Or in a black-and-white PDA.
Yeah. It assumes they have an OS released within the last 5 years.
Because HTML emails tend to be much larger (again, not all of are on broadband all of the time).
Can you quantify that? 'Cause I don't believe that a few font variations have a significant bloating effect on message body size.
Because HTML emails can reference images and other stuff on the Internet, leading either to dial-ups and privacy intrusion or incomplete emails.
Then don't allow them to be displayed in the client. I set KMail's HTML options (it has two: whether or not to interpret HTML and if it does, whether or not to fetch external resources) on a per-folder basis. Some newsletters I get are (at my option) sent in HTML form and may include images. Since I trust the sender, I enable full rendering. In other cases, I may allow HTML interpretation without image fetching. In my junk mail folder, I turn off both, though frankly there's no case when interpreting the HTML without fetching external resources is a risk. That's enough to be safe from the more nefarious uses of HTML email.
Because HTML emails are a prevalent intrusion vector for attacks.
Only for naive clients and users. And for naively written software and clueless users, there are other worse vectors.
Because HTML emails are slow-dog for many recipients who use Outlook. (Not that I use that, but I care for the recipients of my emails, too.)
I suppose you mean "dog slow." I don't know why that would be, since every HTML-capable email client I know just uses the same HTML rendering component used by other applications. (Eudora on Windows has the option to use its built-in HTML renderer or the system one.)
That's enough reasons to allow (i.e., whitelist) HTML emails only for communication partners that are important enough for other reasons to override these arguments.
That's confusing enough that I'm not sure what you're saying. But again, I didn't advocate universal use of HTML, I objected to a categorical prohibition.
Emails are not a good representative of textual expression. In my opinion, they have also many attributes of oral exchanges; its informality not the least. And as with phone calls, I don't have colors to tag important words either.
Oral communication has other ways of indicating emphasis. *Asterisks*, _underscores_ and /slashes/ are stupid, feeble, ugly substitutes for real typographic controls.
Plain text is sufficient to express yourself here. If it isn't, put more effort in it, it will pay back in getting better answers.
Here, maybe. (Maybe not.) The statement to which I objected was:
Please don't ever send someone or anyone you might like, HTML e-mail.
This statement is much too sweeping. Personal communications is even more likely to call for styled text.
...
Joachim
Avoiding and denying styled text in email is sheer Ludditism. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org