Stan wrote:

>On Tue, 6 Jan 1998 08:49:29 -0500 Philo said:
>>I HATE html and rtf in email. I've written probably gigabytes of mail and
>>usenet postings, all with the standard ASCII character set. While my tone
>>may sometimes be misunderstood, I've never been *not* understood because I
>>couldn't underline, color my text, or insert pictures. IMHO, it's giving
>>those who don't have anything to say a chance to waste bandwidth to hide
>>their lack of substance behind form.
>
>I share  your rant.  E-mail is  a text  medium. Adding  colors and  lots HTML
>only obscures the information being  conveyed, no matter how well-intentioned
>the author is.  Color is also not universally supported  on every computer in
>existence and differenet  computers  with different  monitors render colors
>differently so  when one computer setup  might show bright yellow  text as it
>was intended, another might display it in a pale yellow that's barely visible
>to the reader.

Just to add a possible solution to this rant, and such a solution has
worked very well on my list to date....

If there is truly a reason where color becomes absolutely neccesary for a
message or an idea to be conveyed properly (my list has had need for
some graphs and drawings to help explain various topics of discussion)
then creat a web page displaying said idea and leave the web page up for a
week or two, or as long as the current topic of discussion is continuing.
It must be noted that some ideas fail quite miserably initially if tehy
are not put into some sort of graphical form first.  Most people tend to
get a lot more information out of a visual picture than out of the use of
words.  To prove the fact, note how many people you can easily identify by
their face, but how few of them you could actually describe in words such
that a complete stranger would have no trouble identifying the person just
based on the words you use.  It is an almost impossible task.

Anyway, there is my vouch for a web page if images are truly neccesary.

Glenn