text vs html posts on this list...

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Mon, 4 Oct 2004, Carlos Davila wrote:

> Tim,
>
> One has to respect the culture of any individual list. I've received enough 
> responses to know that html posts are not very popular here and that's fine 
> with me....so I'll send my posts in text.
>
> That said, I have to confess that I am not entirely sold on all of the 
> explanations of why html is bad...

i won't comment on the rest of the post, but i will throw in my $0.02 
on this.  HTML is "bad" simply because it's inappropriate.  HTML is 
used for *tagging* content.  what is the point of tagging content on 
this (or any other) mailing list?  it's the content that's important, 
not how you choose to aesthetically represent it.

whether you accept it or not, plain text is the "lingua franca" of the 
internet.  tacking on extra bytes by taking perfectly good plain text 
and turning it into HTML is no more rational than turning it into 
Word, or RTF, or PDF.

rday

p.s.  for those who argue that, hey, it's 2004, *everyone* has a 
whiz-bang, cool, GUI for reading email -- well, sometimes, just to 
read email, i'll fire up my laptop, and just boot to run level 3 where 
i can fire up fetchmail and jump into pine.  i don't waste time 
starting X since it wouldn't get me anything.