Re: [tlug] VT100 Display Capability in Email (Re: Rendering HTMLEmail)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "bruno" == bruno raoult <bruno@example.com> writes:

    bruno> The big difference I see is that we often tend to assume we
    bruno> know the "true path".

In this case, I do.  ;-)

    bruno> In this sense, even my father is more correct, as he will
    bruno> simply say that he "prefers HTML". I prefer the second way
    bruno> of speaking.

"De gustibus non disputandum."  As a matter of religion, I do not
argue with people's tastes.  Nobody is saying your father's preference
is wrong; we're saying he should not have to use HTML to get his needs
served, and a world in which people like him prefer HTML is bad for
everybody.

Hard, impossible maybe, to fix that world.  (Your father doesn't need
fixing, he's just fine.)  I don't care.  I admire Don Quixote.  Or as
Professor Bernardo de la Paz said, "Revolution is not a goal I expect
to achieve.  It is an art I pursue."

    bruno> Said this, I can hardly say "accept my emails, I will
    bruno> refuse yours".

Of course not.  Nobody is advocating that.  What Godwin says is
"here's plain text; if you want me to see your mail, don't send HTML,
send plain text."  What I say to my students is "I have only so many
hours per week I can spend on your mail (and my boss thinks I spend
too many); since HTML (and Word/Excel attachments) slow me down, all
text/plain mails get precedence over those mails, and I don't work
overtime on them either.  Maybe I'll see your mail before the deadline
for submitting grades...."

True, I could use a mailer that allows me to conveniently read HTML,
and even .doc.  That's not the point.  The point is that I, and many
people, not to mention daemons and other programs, often have need to
do things with mailed documents that Wart and Thunderburp and Screwdora
and Outhouse and ILLmail and Ebola-lution simply cannot address.

    bruno> Except if another format comes with more possibilities
    bruno> (bold, fonts, colors, etc...).

If I were using the GUI, I could show you what

_This_ is a *very* interesting and informative thread. :-)

becomes in Gnus on XEmacs with Xft support and custom faces.[1]  Hint:
the only visible punctuation is the single period at the end, and it
looks as good as any HTML because the same fonts are used.  The happy
face is even in yellow, and of course it's right side up.  I'm working
on a TTY, so I can't demonstrate it with a screen shot, but then none
of the programs I mentioned work at all on TTYs.  Plus one for
text/plain, which is the only format guaranteed to work on TTYs by
definition.

If you actually want to do more than that in email, fine, *choose* to
use HTML or PDF if you like -- I have no objection to that if you're
expressing something that requires such capabilities, and my MUA can
handle it without too much annoyance.  But for most people what's used
above is as far as they go.  Then they top-post over 300 lines of
irrelevant quoted crap in glorious technicolor and antialiased fonts.

What a waste!  For example, suppose that tab key took you to the end
of the next quoted paragraph, so that people could use the interleaved
style more conveniently, and the send command automatically deleted
all quoted text without a trailing comment, so that you can't top-post
without extra effort?

Instead Microsoft feeds chocolate to fat kids, so GNOME says "cool,
let's offer ice cream to the merely chubby".  :-(  No wonder they (and
their email) all grow up pimple-faced!

It would require _very_ little code to strongly encourage good style,
but no, that's not what we do.  :-(


Footnotes: 
[1]  The defaults are more TTY-like, because Gnus users by and large
prefer it that way.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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              ask what your business can "do for" free software.