Jim, et al, see below... You raise some good points, and I wanted to address
them in turn.

--
Chris Anderson
Director, Technical Support
Unify Corporation



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jim Styer, Battle Creek MI [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, November 22, 1999 10:52 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Has Microsoft destroyed mailing lists? / Rant Exchange?
>
>
> At 09:29 AM 11/22/99 -0800, Chris Anderson wrote:
> <SNIP>
> >In MY humble opinion, Plain/Text has had its day, and is
> long due to be
> >relegated to the history books.  You may quibble about the
> pro's and con's
> >of HTML vs RTF vs whatever, but the point of email is
> communications.  And
> >there are better ways to communicate than via plain text.
> >
> >Feel free to flame away.
>
> No flames here. Just a strong viewpoint from a career
> word-communicator.
> Plain text does the job simply and effectively for the most
> people (North
> Americans and Europeans I've mailed; don't know about the
> rest of the world
> <G>):

Yes, it is both simple and effective.  No arguments here.  However, I
believe that fonts, colors, underlines, bolds, etc. can add to your impact
as a writer in an easy and effective manner.  Anything that helps me get my
point across to the reader is good, in my opinion.

Unicode languages have no choice, though.  They must use alternative
formats.  With the progressive erasure of borders via the internet, that
will become more and more of an issue.

>
> -- Many people still don't have Web-based or other mail services that
> can read HTML, fonts, colors, graphics and other "stuff." So I would
> prefer simple text messages that they can read easily and quickly
> without having to plow through "stuff" that means nothing to
> them. Yes,
> maybe "lowest common denominator," but they're also important and
> respected subscribers.

I don't believe that there is a platform out there that doesn't have some
form of mail client available for it that understands more than plain text.
Of course, having said that, I expect someone to come up with an obscure
platform that doesn't :-)

The issue is, of course, that without some level of interpretation by the
mail client, you have to plow through extraneous "stuff" to read the
message.  My point is that the tools are freely available to avoid this.

>
> -- Many list messages are simple announcements, information, queries,
> answers and comments that can stand on their own without the need for
> the hype and posterism of headlines, colors or graphical elements.

Perhaps.  However, I believe that this is something that is a bit of a
self-fulfilling prophecy: until you try it, you won't know whether or not a
richer format is more effective.  And, of course, you won't try it because
plain text is good enough :-)

>
> -- A personal pet-peeve: English is a beautiful, rich
> language. Schools
> should again spend the time necessary to teach correct -- and thus
> effective -- use of English BEFORE spending time teaching HTML. (A Web
> page with misspellings and grammatical errors is a real turn-off.)

Absolutely agree with you, Jim.  However, the same is true for plain text.
Note that most html mail clients do not require you to know anything about
html -- you just type and pick fonts, colors, sizes, etc.