Rachel Blackman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> While I /personally/ happen to think plaintext e-mail makes more sense
> and is friendlier overall, the vast numbers of new users of the Internet
> are being introduced to e-mail as a bright, colorful way of
> communicating. Doubtless, the people who wanted the phone left behind
> had /good/ reasons for it - there's something nice about a handwritten
> letter which can be kept and treasured, and shown to descendants, and
> letters can often be more deep, and thought-out.
And notice that we still have both, in different areas, for different
purposes.
But I hardly think that HTML e-mail is as revolutionary as the telephone.
I've seen a lot of people who like the idea of bright, colorful e-mail,
until they've read their fourth letter of bright purple on dark green, and
then they're a bit tired of it. One of the problem with HTML e-mail is
that it puts you at the mercy of other people's layout sense and most
people are abominably bad at laying out text, one of the first things that
most books that teach TeX or LaTeX try to correctly pound into your head.
Insofar as HTML or other marked-up e-mail has real advantages over plain
text, it will eventually catch on over plain text in those areas. And
that's just as it should be. So far, I've not seen much to be "worried"
about in terms of superiority of HTML over plain text; I have actually
encountered one newsletter that I prefer to read in HTML, and for the rest
the HTML is substanially less readable than plain text would have been.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
