On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 08:22:32AM -0600, Palit, Nilanjan wrote:
> I like Unix, emacs and vi, so don't get me wrong. But I also don't
> believe in a 1-D, monochromatic world. Specifically, the human
> senses & particularly the eyes, can take in information
> simultaneously across multiple wavelengths, both literally and
> figuratively. 

My position is in the middle of this argument...

> So why restrict it to a b&w text only? Granted it can & does get
> abused (frequently :-( ), 

This is exactly why. ;-)

> but a well placed bold/italic or a <code> font, especially when you
> are talking about technical stuff, can help the eye pick things up a
> lot quicker. 

I agree completely.  The trouble is, most programs which are capable
of generating html e-mail produce horribly bloated nonsense that's
often anywhere from 1000% to 10,000% more than the actual source text.
It also contains a lot of annoying formatting that my e-mail client
can't handle very well (I use Mutt, and you can pry it from my cold,
dead hands, so to speak).  I generally read my e-mail over an SSH
connection to my server, and I find doing it this way is almost always
preferable to say, using IMAP.  Mutt also offers far more flexibility
in processing mail than virtually all of the GUI apps (though I keep
meaning to check out sylpheed/claws), so using a huge GUI app is out
of the question for me, except maybe at work (though probably there
too).

While it's less common than it once was, there are still lots of folks
who pay by the byte to download their mail.  Plain text is far kinder
for such people.

For those reasons, and others I won't go into, I greatly prefer plain
text mail, despite the fact that I would genuinely often like the
ability to format the text (and only the text) of my e-mail, to
provide emphasis or otherwise set apart certain text elements, and
rarely to provide tabular data.  E-mail that has javascript embeded
seems insane to me, but I'd like it very much if E-mail clients could
support a minimal subset of HTML for just that kind of formatting.
Mutt supports a so-called rich-text format that allows for this sort
of thing, but no one uses it, sadly.  I would otherwise agree that
HTML belongs on a web page...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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