At 6:16 PM +0800 11/2/00, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, John Cowan wrote:
> Common practice for senders is to send mail in HTML, or both text and HTML.
Common practice for receivers is to despise HTML mail; it is banned
on most public mailing lists.
The people in my office love HTML mail. They do not use public mailing
lists. It may be inconvenient for technocrats, but HTML is popular.
But people whose mailer doesn't handle HTML mail get screwed--mail becomes
almost uninterpretable. And visually handicapped people don't appreciate
having fonts and font sizes forced upon them. Even I find that most people's
incoming HTML mail displays in a size too small to read, so I have to go
through the process of highlighting and resizing for every such message.
Occasionally I just trash them, and often I'm tempted to.
You should know your receiver before sending HTML mail. If you don't know
that they can handle it easily, don't do it. I doubt it's just the technocrats
running mailing lists that don't like the HTML; it's probably that they get
complaints from their users. Who are people with hardware, software, or
visual restrictions that make HTML mail, like most accessibility-unfriendly
web sites, very much a pain in the neck or other part of the anatomy.
--
Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!
davep(_at_)acm(_dot_)org