[bf1942] HTML Posting sucks

[Nicholas McGovern]

On Monday 18 Jul 2005 22:55, Steven Hartland wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Flight 800" <Flight800 at Comcast.net>
>
> > For those who are new to technical mailing lists, or think
> > HTML email is the way to go:
> >http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
>
> Old out of date standards not in touch with the real world.
>

As you contradict yourself later in the email, RFCs are not formal 
standards even though many have become pseudo standards by widespread 
adoption. Being old does not make it irrelevant. IP4, TCP, and SMTP are 
all 'old' standards that were used to deliver your email, many of which 
have been supposedly superseded.

> What is crap is adamant bottom posters which leave the entire contents
> of the mail and append a few words / lines forcing everyone to scroll
> though stuff they have just read anyway ( history / previous mail ).
>

Excessive over-quoting for top or bottom posting is something I think 
that both camps can agree on.

> The same goes for HTML, if you dont have a email client
> which can deal with this yet ur living in the 70's get a life.
> Yes for 98% of mailing list posts text is perfectly good, but
> there are a few cases where the formatting capabilities
> provided by HTML mail simply cannot be denied.
>

I think this is where people get confused. Email was always intended as 
a communication medium. People now want to add presentation to this. 
What pertinent formatting capabilities does HTML have over plain text? 
If formatting and presentation is your primary concern, send someone a 
PDF email. It's an open standard with formatting capabilities that far 
outweight HTML.

As for living in the 70's, as another poster highlighted, not everyone 
uses a GUI MUA. If I followed your logic, I'd declare PostScript email 
to be the new email standard and rightfully proclaim that all Outlook 
users are living in the 90's as their email client cannot handle this 
format natively. You're confusing unilateralism for progression.

> N.B. RFC = Request For Comment not Regulation and in
> the case of strict bottom posting the result is: thanks but no
> thanks.
>

Of course. Perhaps I should start posting emails contained in KWord 
format? But then few people would read my messages and that's the 
point. It's not about adhering to a standard. It's about adhering to a 
convention that is readable which, after all, is the whole point of 
email - communication.