There are, of course, some cautious folks who still see their incoming mail as plaintext regardless of how it is sent. It matters, in that case, that the plaintext rendering be sufficient for the links to the full, formatted content to be seen and followed at the option of the recipient. The plaintext should also be a reasonable representation.
I think a good compromise would be for the announcement to provide an abstract in the case when the full text is substantial, with appropriate links. And in that case, a plaintext-only form would be ideal, with a link to a web version. The web version can be internationalized in many ways, including via browser language detection as well as user selection. This musing has me think that 1.There should always be a web-location permalink (whether project blog or elsewhere) 2. The announcement list should only carry plaintext messages with suitable links for archival web location, extended content, other-language versions, etc. - Dennis PS: One advantage of the always-open-the-plaintext approach is that it is generally easy to see the full URLs of hyperlinks, not just the linked text, and be satisfied that there is no phishing/tracking going on. It is also possible to archive/reforward plaintext more reliably (and it is amazing to me how many list-server setups do such a bad job of it after all these years). -----Original Message----- From: Andrea Pescetti [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, January 01, 2012 10:56 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: draft - Website migration(+) announcement - draft On 31/12/2011 Rob Weir wrote: > HTML is not very reliable in email. But maybe we could do this: Create > the newsletter as a webpage, either on the wiki, or via mdtext or the > blog. That has the full text of the newsletter. Then for the announce > list, we just include the table of contents or the first paragraph or some > other enticing lead-in, and then link to the full newsletter. We could also send the whole HTML newsletter with the usual initial link "If the newsletter does not display correctly, click here for the Web version", or similar text. This initial line could also be used to say that translated versions of the newsletter exist. They would not be sent until the time this project has native-language announce lists, but they would be linked from the online version. Regards, Andrea.
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