On Fri, 29 Feb 2008, Samir M. Nassar wrote:
> If the formatting had added anything of worth, fine. But in this case
> the text was not marked up. You know, the Markup in Hyper-text Markup
> Language? Why would you need to markup anyway?
HTML attachments are a constant bother -- everybody is using them. It
must be hard to find a mailer these days that doesn't do HTML by default.
The users are mostly completely clueless. I often receive messages that
use up 50 KB of space but would have been less than 10% the size with no
loss of information if formatted as plain text.
> If you notice, the HTML itself sucks sweaty goat balls, all repetitive
> break tags. If you are sending HTML mail, why again is the mail client
> using font declarations?
Microsoft is a great offender. They try to generate HTML that can be
automagically converted to Word format with no loss of formatting info --
all margins, fonts, etc., are to be maintained. It's a total waste of
bytes in about 95% of cases and it is usually a lot of bytes.
> Lastly it is a pretty long standing convention to not abuse mailing
> lists by sending HTML mail.
Wouldn't it be great if people would do what we wanted them to do!
Unfortunately, it isn't in their interest to care about this issue. If
the system could be configured to send an automatic reply saying:
WARNING: You have sent an HTML attachment to the email list. We will
hold your message in queue for 15 minutes in case you wish to send a
version of this message without the attachment. If we receive a very
similar text-only message in the next 15 minutes, we will forward that
message to the list immediately and we will return your original
message to you without delivering it to the list. Many readers will
not enjoy receiving an HTML attachment instead of a plain text message.
(It could go on to explain how to send plain text in a few of the
common MUAs.)
That would give a little incentive to the habitual HTML users.
Mike