In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> Which prompts the question . . . why is it still, or should it be? I
> can understand, back in the days of BBS popularity, where it would be a
> financial burden on the SYSOP to send packets of larger size than they
> needed to be. But today, many years later, why the resistance to change,
> when (at least in my opinion) HTML makes for a more pleasing page to
> read. Certainly, web browers/sites are not plain text based, so why then
> should messages be so? I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I'm still
> curious about it.
* HTML is an overkill. USENET posts generally consist of four
flavors of content: paragraphs, (nestable) blockquotes,
citation references and signatures.
* In some cases, more structures are used. These are
- unordered list (demonstrated here)
- ordered list
- heading
- emphasis
- blockquote with citation reference from outside the thread
- heading
- very simple tables (for tabular data only--not layout)
All of these can be emulated with plain text, so the motivation
of moving to HTML isn't strong enough.
* Experience has shown that if the HTML functionality is borrowed from a
Web browser, there are more likely to be security/privacy holes than
in a plain text reader.
* HTML newsreaders might not have the UI excellence of the best plain
text readers.
So I'm using a plain text newsreader and I generally just move on
without reading if someone has posted in HTML.
A simple XML vocabulary based on XHTML Basic with the above-mentioned
structures might be cool, though, if nntp servers had a different port
for that format and did transcoding to plain text automatically for the
normal port.
--
Henri Sivonen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.clinet.fi/~henris/
