At 11:43 PM 5/5/2002 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
>that wouldn't bother me a bit if such messages didn't have so much gratuitous
>markup. in the vast majority of html messages I see, the html contains no
>more
>information than could have been conveyed in plain text, but has so much
>cruft in it that it essentially cannot be read as text.
When people first get access to mechanisms for formatting, fonts, etc.,
they tend to overuse it. Over time, they learn to be more judicious.
This is quite true but I don't believe it is relevant. The problem with HTML
isn't users using formatting in it excessively. The problem is that HTML
producing agents produce entirely gratuitous junk in their HTML output
even when there's no fancy formatting present at all.
Formatting that is done well aids the communication, rather than detracting
from it, and adds another dimension to the communication.
Let's not damn the capability just because some people have not yet learned
to use it.
Users are one thing, software is another. The inability to write software
that outputs minimalist markup is well past the point of being amusing.
The idea that email content should be required to have less visual control
than a web page or a document simply doesn't make any sense.
Web page designers regularly have to clean up the lousy HTML generated by
various utilities. But of course this doesn't happen with email...
Ned