> Some (many!) people discourage use of HTML.  Use of HTML is discouraged
> or disallowed for many mailing lists.
>
> On the other hand, I've believed for a couple of years that this
> "discouragement" is antiquated and unwarranted.

I tried to support HTML for the last few years, because I felt that (even
though I read my own email in plaintext) those who wish to send more
elaborate material should be allowed to. For example, I've had at least one
correspondent send me a reference by highlighting a portion of a document in
her word processor and sending the result. The information she was conveying
wasn't identifiable in the plaintext.

I gave up allowing HTML fairly recently, and with regrets. Here's why: a
very major player in the software industry decided that new editions of its
premium office-interface software would invoke that company's word processor
as the default email client. That word processor had had email capabilities,
using HTML, for some time. However, it uses HTML-mail as a conveyor of its
documents, formatting and all. The HTML it produces is, again by default,
massively stuffed with repeated and redundant formatting tags, all
attempting to control the entire appearance of the document.

That's understandable, if one accepts the premise that the format, not just
the information, is to be conveyed. But it turns ordinary email into
monsters. The message would actually be smaller if the word-processor file
were sent as an attachment instead of generating HTML.

For a while, I analyzed email and sent people explanations for why it was
rejected. We keep our limit at 100KB; I don't worry much over archive size,
but large messages tend to push subscribers over their storage quotas
unexpectedly. I can live with the error reports, but sometimes that cuts
important participants out of discussions.

Eventually, the analyze-and-explain approach failed: people are now getting
handed software by their employers and told to use it. They don't even know
they're sending their email in HTML, let alone that their word processor has
created a monster. These are participants in writing data communications
standards! Non-technical types (like my highlight-and-send correspondent)
would probably have even lower awareness of the underlying file structures.

So, I finally had to give up and reconfigure the list to strip HTML. I'd
rather not, but this software company has me in a corner. The combination of
massive document-format-control coding and wide distribution wasn't too bad
as an alternative, pushing-the-envelope method for conveying unusual items
by email. Turning that interface into the default email client was a
crippler.

Oh, and if you tell that word processor you want "plaintext," it does most
of the massive format-control coding anyway.  It just picks a monospaced
Courier font.

Hal Keen