Incoming from Niels Voll: > re: rtf > for me it is less important, who invented it (MS or some other > proprietary vendor), but much more important how widely it is supported.
This is what I think of it too. RTF was never held by Microsoft in a proprietary manner. For whatever reason, just about anything could do RTF. That makes it useful. > re: html email > I agree, as with everything, HTML can be abused, but it sure is nice for > bolding, italics, code snippets, and I find it useful in emails for > making nicely formatted lists with bullets and sub-bullets. With Formatted lists, bullets, sub-bullets, in email?!? No thanks. I can do that in text, and the resulting file size is nothing compared to an equivalent .doc or .rtf A couple of years ago, I saw people were sending emails with stationery; silly ring bindings down the left hand side on ruled notepad paper. Dumb. > course the minimalist / lowest common denominator approach is always the > safest and most inclusive, but it sure extracts a price. The opposite is just as true. The maximalist / highest common denominator mails just make me suspicious. If the ideas contained in the thing were so good, why would the author have to resort to such eye-candy to get his point across? > Please understand, I'm not vehemently arguing for using html in our > emails on this mailing list, but "we have always done it this way" Long ago and far away, much smarter people than you and I thought long and hard about this stuff. Their intent was to make this stuff _work_ for everyone, no matter what they were using to do it. Now, with Wintendo assumed to be on every desktop, people couldn't care less that someone can't do something. Websites that advertise themselves as "best viewed by" such and such browser spit in the face of the intent of the World Wide Web: it was to disseminate information. Now, if you can't/won't fit in, you're SOL and nobody even bothers to apologize. Now, we have to invent hacks like XML in order to try to get along with each other. Not that XML doesn't have its possibilities, but if we'd all kept our eyes on the prize back then, something like XML would be far less valuable today. > p.s. I can't help smiling at the irony for me as probably one of the > older - age, not maturity :) - members of this list, I'm reading > messages from likely much younger members - especially in the > revolutionary world-changing Linux community - arguing against change. > What is this world coming to? :) Well, I'm not one of the younger members. I do remember the original intent of this stuff, and I do resent that that intent has been hijacked away by special interests. There were then, and are now, many people who simply couldn't do it your way even if they wanted; the handicapped, blind, etc. What does stationery hold for them but an irrelevancy at best and a barrier to communication at worst? rxvt + mutt + w3m + emacs + gpg makes a powerful mail platform. rxvt + slrn + emacs + gpg makes a powerful news platform. I think most people have simply never seen how powerful, pretty, and fast these things are compared to the alternatives in the GUI world. It's a much more sensible way of doing things than hopping from Netscape to Mozilla to Galeon to Sylpheed to Balsa to Kmail, always hoping you'll get the damn things to do enough of the things you want without irritating you with their slowness and deficiencies, or indeed losing your mail altogether. I'm not advocating everyone change over to mutt. I'm just trying to explain why pre-Microsoft ways of doing things (Netiquette, ASCII text, bottom-posting trimmed posts) are _the right way_. If you want to use (eg.) Galleon to do those things, that's your choice and none of my business. -- Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. (*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling - - _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
