At 1/6/98 01:24 AM , David Mayerlen wrote:
>Hi,
>
> How bad an idea is it to be sending html-email so that colour can be used
>to accent the text? I thought I'd heard of another rich-email format or
>something that some browsers support???
>
> We have been experimenting with html. Many browsers seem to accept some
>form of html. Its so hard to test for many different possible behaviours
>without copies of all the popular email browsers and all of the various
>platforms at your fingertips to test with (not to mention the many
>versions of the various software packages).
>
> While I'm at it, does anybody know of an "all you need to know about
>MIME and content-type etc.." web site or book? (Wishfull thinking...)

<rant>
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.

Look at it this way- email has been around since what, the 60's? In over 30
years, everyone has said everything they've needed to in ASCII. It's been
fine. Business correspondence, here in the 90's, is still 90% black text on
white background.

And, of course, there's the lowest common denominator issue- still lots of
people using college Pine accounts, Eudora Light 2, and so on. If you're
writing to a business partner or a friend and the two of you want to
exchange ideas in this fashion, that's fine, but for mailing lists to
thousands of strangers, it's wasting bandwidth for minimal gain (you should
hear my hard drive grind when I hit a formatted message in Eudora, as
opposed to ASCII text, which pops right up on the screen).

Keep HTML on the web.
</rant>

Philo
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