On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 11:30, Dave Sherohman wrote: > On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 05:05:29AM -0800, Alexander Hvostov wrote: > > That's a problem with your MUA, not with HTML per se. Once widely-used > > MUAs are sufficiently up to the task of dealing with HTML, this is > > likely to change. > > Enough with the "that's a MUA problem, not an HTML problem" mantra. > It sounds no different to me than an MS zealot saying that inability > to read Word documents is a MUA problem as his response to every > argument offered for why sending Word docs is bad form. The HTML spec for any given version is readily available, as an RFC or W3C Recommendation. Sending Microsoft Word documents was bad form, simply because people could not read them until recently. > > If there are lots of images or tables involved, then yes, this will make > > things harder. Normal text, however, is not a problem. Last time I > > checked, most HTML email (except for stuff sent by companies, who are > > trying to make themselves look 'professional' with their extravagant > > HTML) consists of normal text, laid out in the same way as a plain text > > email, but perhaps with some bulleted lists or such. > > - So you're admitting that most (legitimate) HTML mail doesn't do > anything that plain text can't? Then why add the overhead? No, I'm not. Notice how I said 'perhaps with some bulleted lists or such'. You can't do that cleanly in plain text. > - Bulleted lists, hmm? And here I always thought you could do them > just fine in plain ASCII... Because these are unstructured, they are somewhat of a nuisance for a human to read, and all but impossible for a computer to understand. > > > It was impossible. Couldn't be done. You had to execute a > > > program first. That fact is no longer true. And not only that, but > > > it's gotten worse. E-mail based viruses, utilizing HTML, JavaScript, > > > VBScript, and holes in the HTML rendering engines required to view > > > HTML > > > e-mail have become among the fastest growing and most damaging virii. > > > > Interestingly, you forget to note that only Microsoft Outlook is > > affected by any of them. As much as you may think otherwise, this is an > > Outlook problem, not an HTML or JavaScript problem. Otherwise, Mozilla > > would have the same problems when viewing Web pages. > > Perhaps the propagating ones are Outlook (Express)-only, but there > are other problems. Pretty much all of the privacy-invasion > techniques (web bugs, etc.) are pure-HTML applications, for instance. Web bugs are not relevant. My MUA is configured not to retreive images from the Internet. > > So, you'd prefer to have 16 million Tripod-originated pop-under ads > > instead? > > That's a problem with Tripod, not a problem with emailing links. If you actually _use_ the link (i.e., click on it), it is. My point was that, for that solution, people have to get Web hosting somewhere. More often than not, that somewhere does nasty things like that. Alex. -- PGP Public Key: http://aoi.dyndns.org/~alex/pgp-public-key -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GCS d- s:++ a18 C++(++++)>$ UL+++(++++) P--- L+++>++++ E---- W+(+++) N- o-- K+ w--- !O M(+) V-- PS+++ PE-- Y+ PGP+(+++) t* 5-- X-- R tv b- DI D+++ G e h! !r y ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
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