Robin Whittle wrote:
>I was asked on this newsgroup (netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news) last
>year to write about why plain text email should be the default for email
>clients, rather than HTML.
>
[I can't remember that, but it could well be true.]
Anyways, I don't know, who you are tring to convince or what you are
trying to achieve. Plaintext is the default in Mozilla, after long fighting.
>1 - Plain text is simple and understandable - nothing could be simpler.
> A character is a character. A newline is a newline.
>
Sorry, but that's plain wrong. If you look behind the scenes, that's not
at all the case. A message is a stream of bits.
We chose to arrange these bits in bytes, but that limits the characters
to 256. This means that many languages cannot be represented there, and
even the upper 128 of these 256 are not universially defined. If you
left the english language room, you sure saw odd characters instead of
umlauts or similar.
Also, all 3 major platforms - Windows, Mac and Unix - disagree on what a
newline is.
>What
> you type is what you see and what the recipient receives.
>
No. Apart from the above, the recipient might choose another font (I use
a proportional one) or wrap at different places (e.g. PDAs don't have 80
chars wide displays).
>There
> are no ways, in a proper system, for things changing or being
> obscured,
>
What is a proper system? Many plaintext messages get munged by broken
mailers or MTAs.
>provided sensible right margins are observed in the
> original message.
>
Quotes many times, no reasonable margin will protect from rewrapping quotes.
>5 - The messages can be displayed with minimal fuss on mobile devices
> and text consoles with no graphics capabilities and small
> screen sizes.
>
That's just so wrong.
>7 - Plain text is easy to read,
>
No. It goes contrary to common reading habits, which are proportional
fonts. Also, the reader being able to choose the width of the text
supports readability.
[much cutted - no time atm]
Ben
