On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 04:49:13PM -0700, Owen Densmore wrote: > Bravo! Pure text is pure joy. > > The "power users" destroyed email by adding more and more unnecessary > stuff to it, "feature" upon "feature". For a while the > incompatibilities between mail clients were absurd.
You mean like Outlook, and everybody else? Are there other email clients that were as severely borked at supporting email standards as Outlook? > Mime helped, and > alas, HTML even more. Not convinced that HTML added anything useful ... Being able to typeset maths in email _would_ be useful, but so far HTML has completely failed at that problem. In the meantime, LaTeX encoding has grown to fill the void... > > I guess we should be happy that mail didn't grow to include > spreadsheets, powerpoint etc .. they are still "attachments". > Ahh ... attachments. I received my first MSOffice document circa 1995, but it wasn't until about 2003 that my main desktop computer had sufficient grunt to run Open Office (maybe called StarOffice at the time) so as to be able to effectively open and edit them. In the intervening 8 years, I had to beg someone to download and print the attachments, make my edits on them with a pen, and fax the results back to the original sender. True story. > Interestingly enough, HTML helped boost the newly arrived computer > users back into text editors rather than word processors. This due to > the sophisticated "programming" editors for HTML/CSS/Javascript. > TextMate & Sublime are quite good and avoid the bloat of an IDE. I > was amazed to see the VI->VIM popularity. > > -- Owen > > On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Russell Standish <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 03:59:23PM -0700, Douglas Roberts wrote: > > > Wow. I had forgotten that I was on a mailing list populated by dinosaurs. > > > Thanks for reminding me. What do you use, Russ. Mutt? Or Pine? Or mail. > > > Or do you just do "more" on /var/spool/mail? > > > > > > :) > > > > > > > I use mutt these days - since the early 00s. It has great threading > > capability, good for reading these voluminous mailing lists. I was an > > elm user, prior to that. I never got into pine - one of those reasons > > I alluded to before was to use my editor of choice (emacs), which pine > > didn't allow. > > > > Of course, you might ask why I don't use the builtin email reader in > > emacs. I don't have a real answer to that - habit perhaps? > > > > Why do people think reading email as text is dinosaurian? I have tried > > some HTML-based email clients for various work email scenarios - I > > used Thunderbird for one job - which was OK for the work email, but > > would fail miserably on those aforementioned mailing lists, and that > > unmitigated disaster Outlook, which was mandated as the email client > > for another of my employers. > > > > Cheers > > > > -- > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > > Principal, High Performance Coders > > Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] > > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > > ============================================================ > > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
