Ben Hood wrote:
> As much as I hate HTML mail, it is the accepted norm. Of course
> that doesn't mean I won't try and stop it.
from Or Botton:
>Example from life: I'm running a mailing list for Anime
>(japanese animation) fans. Luckly, most of the list members are
>"advanced" so most of them dont like the idea of having hebrew fonts
>and HTML mail used in the list.
>
>Unfortunatly, we're thinking about expanding the club, which may
>require moving the mailing list form to a web-forum instead, and
>in a popular place where most typical people can find it. This
>means, that everyone will start using hebrew. Also, the only popular
>israeli web-forum site allows only IE5+ to access their site. So..
>
>Because they all allready use only outlook and explorer, saying that
>"only IE is allowed" wouldnt mean alot. And because they all got
>hebrew support in their browsers, saying "hebrew will be used" wouldnt
>matter alot, either. So its a lost case.
>
>Thats life. :)
I don't think HTML email is the accepted norm. Plain text is preferred on many
(most?) emailing lists, and non-binary newsgroups. As Sam Heywood points out,
an HTML attachment is just an unnecessary nuisance when it merely repeats the
text before the HTML part. I find it much worse when encoded quoted-printable.
A quoted-printable HTML attachment, block-copied to a separate file, won't view
properly in a Web browser.
But when it is necessary to accommodate different languages with different
alphabets such as Hebrew, that might not be accommodated with plain text, would
necessitate HTML or a special charset. But doesn't Linux/X-Windows offer good
international support? So please, Or Botton, don't let them move you to an
MSIE5+-only site.
Some of the spam I get is in HTML, and some of that includes Javascript, but I
don't really want to read that. I've even had spam specifying a strange
charset, from .kr domain, that I think might have been intended to be in Korean.
It looked like a bunch of upper-ASCII box characters to me, but even if I could
have read it as intended, it would have been quite unintelligible to me.
