-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Fishwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Saturday, June 13, 1998 10:59 PM
Subject: Re: HTML-formatted mail
>Hmm.. I'd have to disagree here... In my opinion, HTML should *never*
>have been integrated with email. Email should always have been a text
>only medium rather than all this colour and font crap that people are
>putting in with it...
And yet, you used asterixes as the usual crude workaround to the lack of
support for bold or italic text in straight ASCII.
The purpose of email is to communicate information. When we speak, we use
various degrees of emphasis. It's helpful in most cases to be able to
convey this in email, and it's crucial in some cases.
Without some form of markup language, we have to resort to crude workarounds
such as asterixes, all-caps, and the extremely ugly "stick an underbar
before and after".
Unfortunately, you'll find that people misinterpret these. I have a
coworker who actually feels like he's being yelled at if I use all-caps to
emphasize a word, but I could send the exact same email with the word bolded
and he'll interpret it correctly. Yes, he's a jerk, but when I email him
I'm more concerned with communicating than with making some point about
formatting.
A tremendous number of people agree that there should be some kind of markup
language established as a standard for email. Every commercial email
package supports one or more markup methods.
If we're going to have a markup language establish itself as an email
feature, it'd be very helpful if it was a markup language that was in wide
use in other Internet-related places.
I think you'll agree that there is no markup language that is more
associated with the Internet than HTML.
HTML is a standard markup language. It's easy to implement support for it.
HTML interpretation code exists for every platform that connects to the
Internet. Even Microsoft and Netscape agree on HTML as a good compromise
markup language for email.
It really comes down to this:
You're either in favor of HTML markup in email, or you're not in favor of
email being a very rich method of communication compared to speech.
I don't think we should tolerate email remaining in it's outmoded old form
when there's such an easy way to increase it's utility for communication.
Sure, there will be idiots who insist on using colors and tiny font sizes,
but it's trivial to ignore them and they'll grow out of it.
Being opposed to HTML in email is a lot like being opposed to X-Windows.
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