Re: PATCH: don't include text/html in reply, ...

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Wed, 22 August 22:01 Albrecht Dreß wrote:

> > Right, now I've got fact out of the way - HTML mail is shite, not to put too
> > fine a point on it.
> 
> Maybe this is a problem of people coming form a university/science
> environment, where content is more important than 17 different colors and 9
> fonts in one mail... But I know *lots* of people who still use elm or pine
> (the latter one is actually quite smart). 

I don't think academia has a monopoly on the importance of content.  However,
no matter what the content, presentation is all important.  By and large
presentation is pretty good in a simple plain/text message, after all there
is nothing to distract from the purpose of the message.

Unfortunately, for many, the ability to have 17 colours and 9 fonts means that
they will be used resulting in bloody awful presentation.  Then it doesn't
matter whether the content was important or not.  The recipient has switched
off before even reading the message.

Anyway, the major technical problem with HTML mail is that supporting it forces
an MUA to be a web browser :(

> > Sadly back to the world of fact; I occasionally see references by some to
> > HTML mail being non-standard.  Sadly, those who say that are wrong.  There
> 
> Sorry, again... I always think of a *better* world ;-))

No need to apologise!  My better world is one where things are simpler.
Mail without HTML, HTML without javascript, flash, animated images ...
television programs that start at the *same* time every week (are you
listening BBC?), sigh!

> IMHO, this is just a
> flaw in the RFCs, as some "backward compatibility" might be a good idea.

I think the purpose of the RFCs here is to get a bad situation under control,
though arguably they haven't succeeded.  Unusually they specify *two* methods
to reference the multipart/related sections from links in the HTML principal
section.  So a properly implemented reader for multipart/related has to
implement two *unrelated* methods of linking within the aggregate document.
I feel ill.  The aggregate document problem was such that HTML messages with
embedded images weren't even compatible between Nutscrape and Microsloth.

> Just *not* to exclude all the happy pine, elm, SUN mailtool, ... users from
> email communications.

I suspect the M$ strategy is to exclude anyone not using a sufficiently recently
purchased M$ product.

Brian