Re: [Asrg] Introduction and another idea

At 8:17 AM -0600 6/20/03, Vernon Schryver wrote:

>    - image tags should be
> counted because the user presumably wanted
>         the picutre

Well, then as a start we can probably consider the 34% of the email which was multipart/mixed as user-requested.

But actually, even that isn't a good test.  IncrediMail includes an ad logo with every message.  But then, from what I can tell--most of their users signed up specifically because they *did* want formatting.  You can have mood email, images based on the date, background email wallpaper and lots of other fun stuff.

> 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.

Which is in fact, exactly what I said when I talked about Eudora.

> 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?

Because technical mailing lists are run by techies, and we have actively (even on this list, if I recall correctly) berated people who used excessive formatting.  The non-technical lists I'm on getting formatted email all the time--even when the list software filters it out.  I'd estimate that about 50% of the messages I get on one non-technical email list have a message from Yahoo about attachments having been filtered out.  People set background wallpaper for their email!  Customizing fonts and colors is something end-users do every day in their word processor.  They have no idea why they shouldn't do it in their email.  Do they *need* to?  No, of course not.  Do they want to?  Obviously.

And does a non-techie know why I just put "*"'s around the "need" in the previous paragraph?  Maybe.  Would they do it?  No, of course not, they'd just hit the bold button.

I will make another attempt to determine how much of that email has user-specified formatting.  But it's very hard to quantify.  If they cut and paste a message (e.g. not forwarded) and it ends up with the mail headers bolded--was that a user-decision (after all, the system is only making sure the email looks just the same as it does in the UI, and the receiving MUA won't do it) or gratuitous formatting?  Judging intention from formatting is not trivial.

And of course, it's not clear it matters here.  HTML-blocking will not work.  Microsoft isn't going  get rid of WYSIWYG in their email programs, and commercial mailers aren't going to drop HTML as a format for their mailings.  The whole thing would just turn into another massive whitelisting problem.

-- 

Kee Hinckley
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I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.

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