I had written,
T> I've yet ever to see HTML, RTF, nor any other fancy presentation used
T> to make email easier to read or to understand. For web pages, yes,
T> but never yet for email.
Michael Berch responded,
B> Disagree.
You disagree with my statement that I've never seen it?
B> One good example is a message that includes visual material,
B> such as graphs or charts. A colleague recently took some MRTG graphs
B> that documented the symptoms of a particular network problem, captioned
B> them, overlaid some text as an annotation, and mailed them out in
B> advance of a teleconference. Much better than mailing out his comments
B> as text and trying to make reference to the MRTG graphs on a web page
B> somewhere.
Let me ask this: were there recipients without HTTP or FTP access? If not,
how was pictorial email "much better than" (or any better than) a single-part
text message supplying a URL to "a web page somewhere"? That's not a chal-
lenge: it's an honest question, because with what little I know I just do not
see the benefit, except for those recipients (if any) who could use neither
HTTP nor FTP. It sounds worse to me: every recipient of the message had to
take all the graph data, but had he sent just a URL, those who neither needed
or wished to see the graphs would not have had to receive them, and others
could get the data by HTTP rather than by SMTP or POP3, without the MIME-
wrapping and 7-bit encoding.
Even if pictorial email was the best way to distribute those graphs, let's
not overlook that the example is a rare exception amid all the email where
additional parts, fancy formatting, and extra encoding are content-free bloat
(or sometimes content-detracting bloat, as when the font is too small or too
ornate, the color contrast is insufficient, or the background interferes with
the foreground). If an act is good once out of every 10,000,000 times it is
done while it's bad 9,999,999 times, that may be a different problem from its
being uniformly bad, but there's still a problem.
