Re: Email Format Poll for the list

[Stroller <..hidden..>]

On 31 Jan 2010, at 00:46, David Godfrey wrote:
> ...
> and long before I sent an email on the list I had noticed that many  
> contributors also sent in HTML.

My belief was that the practice of sending HTML messages to this list  
was established only amongst newcomers, who come here looking for help  
& who don't know any better.

> One problem with plain text and modern clients, is that text is  
> wrapped at the senders end.
> Normally to something like 72characters.
> This is a huge waste of screen space where you may easily have 160  
> to 300 or more characters available on a modern screen.

Addressed elsewhere.

> HTML also allows simple formatting changes (like this) that can  
> often assist with readability.

It does so, only if your view and and mine *happen* to coincide on  
what constitutes "readability".

It is sophisticated & adult of you to choose black text as your  
display preference, as many people composing in HTML choose colours  
such as blue, green or pink.

However your text size is too small.

I have 1600x1200 monitors, each with a diagonal of c 20". I don't know  
what size or resolution your monitor(s) is, and I don't care, just as  
you shouldn't need to know the specifications of mine. When I  
configured my mail client preferences some years ago, I spent some  
minutes choosing the optimal font for viewing. It says "13 points" in  
my display preferences, but it would probably appear a different size  
on your screen; that doesn't matter - it's just best for me on my  
monitors, considering my operating system, viewing distance, screen  
resolution and optical prescription.

When you send me HTML email, you're saying "I don't care what text  
size you find most readable, I'm setting this one instead". The font  
of your last email was a few points too small and it's a little  
difficult for me to read.

Additionally, if we all continue to post and reply in HTML, then I  
can't copy a sentence of your message into mine and quote it, (like  
this: "The sentence before last was all one line") without either it  
ending up in a different format to the rest of the sentence. I then  
have to manually & arduously change the font, font size, and colour of  
the pasting to match the rest of my text. This should not be  
necessary, if we all just post in plain text.

I do rather feel that those of us who believe in open-source and open- 
standards missed an opportunity when HTML first became adopted by  
mainstream email clients. I believe this was initiated by Netscape  
Communicator in the mid- to late-1990s, and geeks simply objected to  
it and said "don't use that around here". Of course the mainstream  
didn't listen to the geeks, and an HTML email non-standard was since  
been made up on an ad-hoc basis over the following decade. I was a  
newcomer to computers myself in 1996, and didn't use OSS for another 3  
or 4 years, but I can only think that *maybe* someone would have been  
successful if they had vigourously proposed an alternative before it  
was too late.

Email would benefit from the ability to designate text clearly as  
bold, italic or underlined, to include inline hyperlinks, to designate  
perhaps a word or a sentence or two as "emphasised" in some way that  
would normally be displayed to the reader as red or blue. But it needs  
this without allowing whole emails to be composed in glaring pink, or  
allowing the sender to specify a font size which distracts or inhibits  
readability (or indeed ANY font or size).

I have a client who employed a graphic designer to create fancy HTML  
"stationary" for his company emails. They include a number of logos  
(sent as jpeg images, of course) and as a consequence a one-sentence  
email, in which there are only a few hundred bytes of text, arrives  
consuming 100kb in my email box. This aspect of the client's messages  
is annoying, but overall the most critical problem is the imposition  
of font & its size upon the reader, IMO.

If you post in plain-text, no-one will think less of you for it, and  
no-one will filter your messages to /dev/null on the basis of that.  
The same cannot be said for posting in HTML.

Also: please try to post your messages as a general rule only to *one*  
list at a time. Surely everyone on -dev already reads -users?

Stroller.