It is a bit humorous: the "What You See Is What I See" idea .. and its little brother WYSIWYG, but there is also an interesting point to be made. It seems to be _hard_ to obtain!
This is one of the reasons, IMHO, that twitter is so popular. I've started using it quite a bit simply because it _is_ so readable and very fast to do so. And it definitely has the greatest info content per sq. in. of any media I'm aware of. On thinking more about it, the chief problem I have with formatting in email is that our various machines and their apps have absurdly different ways of setting these things. So when I use GMail's web-mail system, it allows four text sizes, tiny to huge. I have absolutely no idea how these translate to your screen. I've resorted to creating images of email, sending it to the sender, and asking "is this what you meant me to see"? and gotten a horrified, Gawd No response. What I find is Silos of Usage: i.e. folks on Windows running Exchange will agree between themselves. GMail-ers ditto. Mac mail.app-ers too. Oh, and naturally Twitter folk. And naturally the Unformatted Text folk, bless them. Maybe we should have an agreed upon style that we all share and a few Windows, Mac, Linux hipsters transmit instructions on how to obtain that style with each of the Silos? -- Owen ============================================================ 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
