Replys with broken HTML see [Re: [CLUE-Tech] Re: "Hmm... I I disagree."]

[Jed S. Baer]

On Fri, 24 May 2002 10:58:07 -0600
Tim Harris <tdharris at usa.com> wrote:

> Jed S. Baer wrote:
> 
> >"Tim Harris" <tdharris at usa.com> wrote:
> >
> >>Just a comment. I find it annoying to scroll through a post and see a
> >>lot of non-functional html code. It's a pain. Does any else have an
> >>opinion about this?
> >
> I'm not opposed to the rich text format but it seems to get all screw up
> when it's sent to a discussion list. I select plain text only when I 
> send email to lists such as this. I'm using Netscape 6.2. I suppose I 
> could use something like fetchmail or pine but I'm too lazy to take the 
> 5 minutes to configure it. Frankly, I occasionally need to look at and 
> print html formatted email (invoices and the like). I suppose I'm in 
> danger of turning this into a discussion list so I will stop.

There are certainly occassions when sending an RTF, PDF, whatever, using
e-mail as the transport mechanism, is really fine. When you have an
arrangement with some other party, and are expecting particular documents
to come through as such, hey it's great to be able to use
mime-encapsulation to send such things.

As with so many other things I rant about, the question is whether it's
_necessary_, i.e. is there something essential conveyed by using other
than plain text, or is it just fluff. And, in the case of e-mail, there
are plenty of people using older software (or software which just takes
the [IMHO correct] stand of "e-mail is plain text and should stay that
way") who will have trouble reading it. Note that I'm not saying that some
particular document should not be sent as an attachment as HTML, but
that's a different thing. The main body should just be plain text (in
whatever language you use).

Just curious whether Nutscape's new e-mail program still interprets and
executes all HTML tags in a e-mailed document. I can remember a while back
getting spams with <IMG> tags in them, and I was initially shocked when my
_mail_ program actually behaved just like a web browser, and retrieved the
poxy things.

My personal recommendation is Sylpheed. It's really a snap to set up and
run. It strips HTML and shows you the plain text. It's fast. Hey, it'll
even auto-sort your mail into various folders, if you like.

Since this is a discussion list, I don't see any harm in having the
discussion ;-).

jed
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