At 07:45 PM 10/12/2006, you wrote: >>I have no idea who ever thought that HTML content in an email is a >>good idea except for working hyperlinks, which I think are nice when >>working on a GUI desktop. > >HTML::Strip takes care of that for me ;) There's absolutely nothing >inside the HTML that can't be conveyed as plain text just as easily. That's not really a true statement. There can be an awful lot of value in putting structure to a document if done correctly. You might as well also point out that there's nothing in a text document that can't be conveyed in pure binary. I won't belabor the point beyond one example: tables. Very often, a table is the most sensible way to structure some sort of data to be easily understood. In plain text, to make a table, I need to use a fixed-width font and use spaces to line up the columns properly. If, during editing, I need to put more text into a cell in the table, it's massive work with the spacebar and delete key to rework the whole mess. And then I need to hope the recipient has a fixed-width font, and has screen width enough to display all 80 characters, because if the lines wrap it will be very hard to read. Woe to he who is using any type of a mobile device to read the message. Or has a vision impairment and uses large fonts. Or for that matter is completely blind and has to rely on a text reader that might or might not be able to make sense of my table layout. Or anyone who just plain prefers the readability improvement of proportional-spaced fonts. I haven't seen many books published in Courier lately. Or would you prefer that people send any kind of content that's even slightly structured as an attachment? And as what, then? Surely not HTML! Maybe Microsoft Word? Or PDF? I suppose you also prefer CSV (or tab delimited or whatever) for data interchange instead of XML in all cases? David
More information about the ECLUG mailing list