Many thanks to everyone for your comments and advice. 

There is one argument for using HTML that I didn't go into. Since my 
newsletter is about language, it would often be helpful to be able to 
include entities or Unicode for accented characters. And I do sometimes 
post images to the RSS version.

But you have confirmed my view that this is one box it's better not to 
open. The idea of putting a formatted version on the Web site is a good 
alternative for those who really want a pretty version and it would be 
very easy to create using code based on the RSS output.

-- 
Michael Quinion
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