Re: [gentoo-user][ot] mail links as footnotes

[Stroller]

On 2 Dec 2008, at 12:25, Dale wrote:
> ...
> This reminds me of the text/html debate.  If you put links in the body
> and some guru that has the answer doesn't like links in the body, they
> may not read your post and you could be left without a answer for a
> while longer.  Or worse yet, if it is some software that is rarely
> used,
> they may be the only one here that uses the software and has the
> answer.
>
> I prefer html messages myself but a lot of people here don't like them
> so I send text.  Some users even have filters that sends html to
> /dev/null which means they don't ever even get seen or read.  This is
> something you may want to consider when you send something.

I've been wondering for a while why no alternative has been proposed.  
HTML was originally considered poor because it wasted bandwidth, HTML  
messages being *at least* twice the size of the plain text, but often  
several times as large. I wonder if console-based mail-readers were  
late in adopting it for that reason, and it gained additional  
unpopularity amongst programmers & the technorati as a consequence.

Nowadays HTML is bad principally because it imposes fonts upon the  
reader. I know what size my monitor is & at what size my mail program  
should render text. I have an HTML-capable mail reader & have no  
objection to the HTML messages sent by Amazon & Deep Discount, because  
they are clear & readable - they have expensive design teams who  
clearly take a deal of time ensuring that. But a poster to the  
Openmoko mailing list a while back formatted his messages not only in  
a tasteful green which I'm sure he enjoyed a lot, but also in a tiny  
font which was unreadable on my screen. Undoubtedly it looked fine to  
him, but I don't know what resolution he was using - 800 x 600??? -  
because the characters were about 2mm high on my 20" @ 1600 x 1200.

What I think would be ideal for email would be a very simple text  
markup which allows italics, underline, bold and strikethrough  
characters in addition to links. I'd love to be able to convey those  
kinds of emphasis to readers, and I'd also love to be able to use  
proper clickable links in the body of a text message, but at present I  
can't, because I don't think it's appropriate for me to impose 13- 
point Verdana on those who prefer Times or Courier in some other size.

EDIT: I guess a text size +1 for headers would also be appropriate  
(+2, -1, -2), bullet points plus superscript and subscript. Clearly  
some hashing out would be appropriate, but ideally formatting should  
be minimal, so that even displayed as pain-text the formatting is not  
intrusive; EG: --strikethough--, /italics/, _underline_ &c.

I have also found that clients appear inconsistent about how they  
apply quoting to HTML messages. At least often if I reply to an HTML  
message and change it to plain text then the quoted message magically  
looses a level of quoting. Typically I change to plain-text like this  
because I've copied & pasted a single sentence out of the quoted  
section and it comes out into my own paragraph as blue, the wrong size  
and an inconsistent font - this is another grip about HTML.

> Also, I have ran into tinyurl not working or if I look up a old
> post, it
> may have expired or something and the link goes nowhere.

I'm surprised by this, and always assumed TinyURL kept their links  
forever. Are you sure it's not simply that the post is so old it  
points to a target page that no longer exists? It looks like TinyURL  
have the capacity for about 2,176,782,336 unique links before they  
need to add another digit after the slash.