Re: [gentoo-embedded] Correct uclibc profile to use?

[David Ford]

Personally, I am for permitting HTML, or rich text email.  I quite
prefer to use rich mail.  I am also judicious in it's use so it's not
bloated like M$ mail.

This list has very rabid anti-html users.  They would rather pollute
emails with a large amount of spaces to position their content and odd
characters to represent barely decipherable graphic content than use a
language designed for marking up and laying out the presentation.

Eventually their kind will grow old and the younger generation will take
over.  They will go the way of the 74 column force wrapped emails who
went the way of the 36 column force wrapped emails, etc, etc.

All their excuses are entirely lame.  All modern mailing list software can:

  a) reform mail from HTML to plain text
  b) archive both plain text and HTML mail just fine

All modern MUAs can also present the end user with plain text
representations of HTML or use the text/plain mime part instead of the
text/html mime part whether it is native or by sub shell.

This particular subject comes up several times a year and will continue to.

HTML mail is neither ignorant nor non-standard but you will definitely
have several people on this list lambast you as such.

Further, I consider these people hypocrites since most of them run
websites and use HTML markup.  Why don't they make plain text web
pages?  Their content can be expressed just as stone age appearing as
their text email is expressed.

^_^

-david

Ed W wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>
>>> You appear to be using KMail which supports html mail just fine...
>>>
>>
>> which ive disabled so i dont have to deal with it.  replies/quoting easily
>> break and destroy followups.  all so people can force their preferred viewing
>> font on others.
>>
>
> Actually, getting all technical on you for a moment, but at least in
> theory HTML has the ability to properly support replies and quoting as
> part of it's standard
>
> ...Absolutely with you though that the most popular MUA in most
> circles is Outlook and this fails even to reply and create a proper
> indent let alone using decent use of HTML tags...  Oh well.
>
> Not really sure what Thunderbird does - it prompts sometimes and
> othertimes does it's own thing..  Hope this is plain text?
>
>> if you want to make the argument on a non-technical list, go for it.  open
>> source technical lists (such as this one) have all banned html.  get with it
>> or dont post.
>
>
> I already nailed my colours to the mast as someone who cares (remember
> I serve customers with only 20KB/minute of bandwidth!) - I was
> pointing out that this debate pops up time and time again and
> basically it's like trying to hold back the tide...
>
> For what it's worth I have a very clever filtering setup as part of my
> ISP arrangement which simply automatically converts html to plain text
> and archives the original so that you can get it back again if you
> need it, etc.  I think if you really want plain text only then it's
> far easier to just setup the mailing list to convert all mails
> automatically than it is to try and badger users to change their habits...
>
> Personally I think this is a problem solvable by computer and I'm all
> in favour of stuff where teh computer does the work rather than humans
> having to press one more key just to do something (which is basically
> also your complaint).  I can point you towards some html flattener
> software if you are the admin for this list?
>
> Good luck
>
> Ed W

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