From: Kee Hinckley <nazgul(_at_)somewhere(_dot_)com>
Why don't you test that impression? This is a question that can be
measure, and I think makes sense. How much of that mail involves real
formatting? If you choose 50 messsages at random, how many use HTML
and of those, how many use any real text formating? (e.g. intentional
use of <em> or <b> as opposed to noise added by MUAs to all HTML
messages they create)
That turns out to be extremely difficult to detect. In particular
forwarded messages use lots of HTML formatting. That and lots of
other things, like links, image tags, font changes are *not*
gratuitous formatting. They make it easier for a user to pick out
which parts of the message come from where. Yes, we know there are
other ways (Eudora creates vertical bars for quoted text without
using HTML, and links show up as links, and attached images show up
inline anyway).
I disagree with all of that. I carefully did not say anything about
writing code to look at 100,000 messages but suggested manually
examining a modest sample of messages. For each of the issues you raise:
- you can almost always see which formating is due to quoting some
other message. That formatting is gratuitous and should not be
counted, because the receiving MUA can do it without HTML.
- links should not be counted because MUAs automatically detect
them in plaintext and make them "active"
- image tags should be counted because the user presumably wanted
the picutre
- font changes that are not gratuitious should of course be counted
- if you find HTML formating that you can't decide whether it's
what the user asked for, then asssume it is not graguitious.
I predict that you'll find that other than quoting other messages and
silly noise added by rote to all of their output by lame MUAs, you'll
find essentially no uses of HTML formatting. I claim that users almost
never ask for bold, some other font, or include (as opposed to MIME
attach) images.
But the fact of the matter is that HTML email is not
just fluff--it's a component of the UI that makes it easier for many
people to use email. Whether they deliberately make a piece of text
bold is not a determiner of whether they want their email formatted.
That religious statement isn't a good counter to my claim. It also
confuses MUA presentation with sender formatting. An MUA does *NOT*
need HTML from the sender to render quoted text in a different font,
color, or whatever.
My claim is that the vast majority of HTML mail has no formating that
the sender cares about. If your position is ground in reality as well
as enthusiasm, it will be trivial to disprove my claim. I don't have
access to a stream of general (non-spam) user mail, or I'd take a
sample and make the count myself. The mail I can count (e.g. to
various mailing lists) implies that HTML formatting is even less valued
than I claim.
If HTML formating is so valuable, valued and nearly universal used,
why haven't we seen much of it in this mailing list? Why wasn't
that text you quoted of mine in green italics or something?
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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