Ben Bucksch wrote:
>...
> If you give people plaintext editor, I am sure, they wouldn't know how
> to stress words, other than maybe by falling back to type writer
> machine habits and doing _underline_.
Are you SURE about that? REALLY sure?
(*Asterisks* and _underlines_ might be a hacker eccentricity, but
capital letters sure ain't.)
> Similarily, I am very sure that most people would consider it be a
> pain to have to write bulleted lists with a plaintext editor only.
Only obsessive typographers such as myself would worry about trying to
indent successive lines in the list. Most would be quite happy just
putting a number or asterisk at the start of each paragraph, with no
indention of later lines.
>...
> > doesn't mean that it is doing a service to people to indulge their
> > most obvious and inexperienced desire.
>
> Agreed. But I do think that wour solution is best. (OK, if maybe we
> remove Fonts and Colors in the Composer.)
Judging by my watching of those Hotmail and Yahoo Mail users who turn on
the `Rich text' option, and by the HTML messages I receive myself, fonts
and colors are the only things HTML message authors are interested in at
all. (Bulleted lists, tables, etc are offered in the HTML toolbar, but
I've *never* seen people use them, or received messages that contain
them -- other than those in the netscape.public.mozilla* hierarchy itself.)
So, removing fonts and colors from the HTML message composer would be a
sure-fire way of removing all the attraction the feature has for users,
while retaining all the aggravation it causes. Which would be a neat
trick if your long-term plan was to make plain text composition the
default, but you appear not to want that.
>...
> > [webmail] would seem to disprove your idea that
> > Mozilla must pander to people who want something flashier.
>
> I think that hardly anybody who uses email regularily uses webmail.
>...
Only rarely do our customers do anything else but use Webmail. We have
thousands of customers per day. Hotmail has about 90 million accounts
(though perhaps a couple of million of those are spam accounts). Yahoo
Mail is in the tens of millions too.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing
<http://mozilla.org/>
