Chuq Von Rospach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> At 8:48 PM -0800 11/1/00, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> But I hardly think that HTML e-mail is as revolutionary as the
>> telephone.
> no, but it is as significant as black&white -> color TV, or vinyl records
> -> CD.
Sorry, Chuq, but I don't believe that either. :) My plain text e-mail is
in very nice color, highlighting important information, without any markup
put in by the sender at all. This would be true if there were no way of
doing that before HTML, but that's false.
I have a mail reader that lets me read mail in HTML quite easily and well,
including inlined graphics. I receive both types of mail on a regular
basis. By and large the plain text mail is more readable because I know
what information is important to *me* and therefore have my mail reader
configured to correctly highlight that information, and the presentation
skills of the people who write the HTML is abominable.
There are occasional exceptions, where people put real effort into making
a nice presentation in HTML e-mail, and in those particular cases I like
the results.
I don't expect to see this happen for discussions for the simple reason
that it's too much work to do it well and if not done well, it looks worse
than if you just don't do it at all. This is independent of markup
language; this is just a general fact about adding markup to text via any
mechanism.
While you're going on about the future of technology, I'm looking at the
*actual capabilities of the technology* and going "sure, that's cool in
some situations, but this is hardly revolutionary stuff."
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
