Re: word format

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

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


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