OT: HTML email (was: gnome desktop backround)

[Sean]

On Wed, December 8, 2004 3:44 am, John Summerfield said:
> On Wednesday 08 December 2004 04:09, Sean wrote:
>>  HTML is good enough for web pages, its good
>> enough for email
>
> HTML is _the_ internet standard for web pages. It's _not_ a standard for
> email.
>
Lots of people use HTML email.  The point I was making was that the notion
that it's unworthy because it might be rendered slightly differently in
one browser over another doesn't hold water.   If it's good enough to
handle content rendering for the web obviously its every bit good enough
to handle content rendering in email.

> There is a very simple rule for asking questions on this list
> (or any others):
> Send your email in a format that the highest number of potential
> respondants will read.

Well that's not a bad argument.

> I don't recall anyone saying that they _expect_ people to email to them in
> HTML, but a good number of people say that HTML is undesirable or
> unacceptable.

People say a lot of things.

> _I_ require that email is rendered apprpriately by the email client I've
> chosen for reasons that seem good to me.

You're certainly entitled.

> When I remind people to post no HTML, I do so because I cannot read their
> mail without skipping over the HTML myself.

That's fine, you're not required to read every message.   Myself I skip
every message with a subject line that doesn't start in a vowel.

> Your questions are not that important to me.

Now you're just tryin to hurt my feelins.

> What my email client does with plain text is quite irrelevant: I can
> customise
> my GUI browser to display in a font and size that suit me, it recognises
> imbedded links so I can click on them, but those links are recognised
> because
> they look like links, not because some (possibly invalid) markup language
> says they are links.
>

*shrug*.   How hard would it be, if you really felt strongly, to use a
script that stripped the HTML tags out and converted it them to text.   
Instead you impose your own personal preference on oodles of others.

> Here are some potential HTML nasties. I don't pretend that these apply
> specifically to email sent to this list, but email clients set to render
> HTML from one source likely do so from all.
>
> [... snip list of bugs ...]
>
> Turning off HTML rendering if you can is one way to avoid some of these
> problems.

Then fix the clients instead of trying to fix a world full of naughty people.

>
> kmail has HTML off by default and  I do not intend to change it.
>

Bravo.


Cheers,
Sean