On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 03:30:56PM +0800, csj wrote: > HTML (and its cousin XML) is also open and free. But most folks in this list > hate it like hell.
For email, sure. Many (perhaps even most) of us use non-GUI programs to read mail. Best case, HTML adds nothing for us (and, it could be argued, HTML rarely adds anything even if you are using a GUI mail reader). Worst case, it's a nuisance, presenting us with the choice of either starting an external program to render it or trying to read around the HTML tags (I generally choose to just avoid the issue by ignoring HTML messages completely). For documentation or anything else that is likely to have meaningful, thoughtfully-applied formatting applied, however, most of us seem to love HTML: $ find /usr/share/doc/ -iname \*.htm\* | wc -l 8630 HTML can do a lot of things plain text can't; nobody's denying that. However, those things carry a cost, both in overhead and in readability on minimalist software. Sometimes those costs are justified. Other times they aren't, and something else should be used instead. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
