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Re: For The Record: HTML Email on the Internet; RFC 2557


On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 17:04:25 -0700, Randall R Schulz <rrschulz at cris dot com> wrote:

Max,

At 16:26 2003-04-10, you wrote:

There's nothing wrong with HTML mail when used tastefully and in a way which
enhances communication.


Unfortunately, a lot (most?) of the time, HTML mail is used in such a way
that it detracts from the content of the message and is simply a needless
bandwidth sucker.

As to taste, the pattern that typically presents itself is that when a new, richer mode of expression becomes widely available is that they get a little crazy at first. Soon enough, however, they settle down to reasonably moderate usage. Desktop publishing showed this phenomenon with excessive use of multiple fonts, font variation and other goo-gaws. You don't see much of that any more.


email from mom. she has used email for 6 months. she sends unreadable pink text.

your argument becomes moot when you consider all the necomers to email who consistently use unreadable fonts and colors.

though i do see your point.

I'm unsympathetic to the bandwidth waste argument. There's abundant bandwidth on the Internet (in fact, there's a lot of dark fiber out there just waiting to be used). I have only a dial-up modem and I have no trouble doing the usual Internet browsing (in fact, probably more than usual, and I'm a bit of troller, actually--as in trolling for resources as a fisherman trolls for fish, that is). On top of my Web use, I get upward of 500 email messages each day including the distributions of 25 mailing lists. Except for the 100 or so that are spam (I kid you not), I save them all.

as do i. though, i've moved up to cable. (before that, DSL.) some people (i'm sure even on this list) dial up to a long-distance number or get chaged per megabyte they use. sucks for them when they need access to a list like this and they have to deal with emails that jack up their bill sky-high.

or what about people using palm pilots who can't read fancy emails? or the system administrators who use Pine to remotely read their email because they don't have the ability to use a remote client?

you'd be jacking them all by sending HTML. parsing bad HTML that clients like Outlook output is painful.

By far most of the HTML mail is UCE. Some of that is grotesque (not for its message content, but for its presentation) but even the spam is mostly decent HTML. For the few pieces of mail that I actually solicit in HTML mode (newsletters such as those published by the Java Developer Connection or WinXPnews or the New Scientist newsletter) I enable the Microsoft viewer in Eudora. Otherwise for simple font variations, bullets and indents, Eudora's built-in rendering is fine (though not without its glitches).

case in point. it's annoying. you've said so yourself, though not in so many words. you have to configure your client to use the MS parser or else it's a little buggy. that'd be enough to annoy me.

i solicit several newsletters, but i get them plaintext. why? my client of choice, Opera 7, does not display embedded images in email (backgrounds, the <img> tag, etc.). i like that. i want it to stay that way. so, i get my newsletters in plaintext so they actually display right. if HTML is the only option, then suck. i don't need it.

it's my choice and i stick by it. you're forcing your opinion on us.

A decent dial-up modem (by which I mean a well-designed v.92 modem) will compress HTML to the point where 10 to 11 kilobytes per second throughput is readily achieved. This is almost twice the speed that most of the links in the original ARPAnet used (not that it's very significant--I just think it's interesting).

interesting, but useless information. it bears no meaning to your argument. besides, not everyone is on a connection clean enough to transfer at full speed, or their ISP doesn't have support yet for v.92. sorry, it's a moot point.


Randall Schulz



-- Charles "grey wolf" Banas http://the-junkyard.net tech advisor

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