On Thu, 11 May 2000 15:04:48 EDT, Scot Mc Pherson
<smcpherson(_at_)clearaccess(_dot_)net> said:
The necessity to send e-mail in html is NOT. Regardless of whether a
list
or commerce wishes to advertise through e-mail, there are already avenues
for distributing material to demographically selected individuals. Its
called the WWW and creating hypertext links in an e-mail to direct a user to
desired content is certainly MORE than enough, and also solves part of the
congestion problem, because the user must take the time to visit the site in
question as opposed the site making a visit to each and every recipient of
the message, whether they care about this week's issue of the newsletter or
not.
Strictly speaking, part 1: E-mail as a while is not a necessity. The US
Postal Service has a 200 year record of delivering large amounts of material
in a reasonably cost-effective manner.
Strictly speaking, part 2: A case could be made that there should *NOT* be
hypertext links in a text/plain segment of an E-mail. RFC2046, section 4.1.3
says pretty specifically:
4.1.3. Plain Subtype
The simplest and most important subtype of "text" is "plain". This
indicates plain text that does not contain any formatting commands or
directives. Plain text is intended to be displayed "as-is", that is,
OK? Got that? In other words, it's *PLAIN* text. You want hyperlinks,
use text/html or some other type that is defined to support them....
(Yes, I *know* people violate this all the time. Doesn't mean we should
encourage it *more* just because we don't like text/html....)
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Operating Systems Analyst
Virginia Tech