[tlug] Changing subject in thread.

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

Daniel A. Ramaley writes:

 > If something cannot be expressed in plain text, then it is my
 > personal belief that the idea has not been thought through well
 > enough to be expressed properly.

I agree with the conditional as stated. :-)  But with improvements in
technology so that almost all mail is displayed in a GUI environment,
in principle we don't need to avoid use of typography (including
color) rather than plaintext markup conventions, as long as the
semantics are restricted to those commonly found in email.

The problem is that there is no such thing as "rich-text".  There's
Microsoft "Rich Text Format", which is obviously out as a binary
format, there's RFC 1896 "text/enriched" which isn't implemented well
or completely in any MUA I've used (but that doesn't include
ThunderBird or whatever GNOME recommends, Evolution?), and there's
HTML.

Unfortunately, HTML isn't really acceptable, since as implemented by
many agents (eg, Word) it's not at all a human-readable format (even
Gmail is quite bad).  Worse, without a full DOM implementation, it's
entirely unsuitable for use on most mailing lists because there's no
simple way to add headers and footers to the message body, and ensure
that all MUAs will display them as expected (which is very bad if they
contain legalese such as responsibility disclaimers or the unsubscribe
URL required in some jurisdictions).  Problems with HTML mail are
frequently posted to the Mailman lists.

So for now (both by personal preference and as a Mailman developer) I
recommend sticking to plain text conventions.