Subject: HTML mail to the list
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Sun Sep 16 2001 - 16:51:14 GMT
To all list posters: please be sure that when you are submitting mail
to the list, you set your mailer to send PLAIN TEXT only, not HTML.
Email is traditionally a text-only medium, although HTML-ism has crept
in over the last couple of years, unfortunately.
One reason it's a problem is that a lot of us who read the list cannot
*read* HTML mail. For me and other people using textual mailers, the
message comes along blank; if I delve deeper, I find raw HTML code,
which I confess I don't really have the energy to read; it requires
a kind of translation on the fly and I don't always have the chance
or concentration to do that.
Second, when such messages go into the archive, which I also maintain
through my mail, they either go in as gibberish or as HTML code,
depending on how they were composed and in which mailer. So, I have
to manually edit the message into plain text so that it can be indexed
and archived properly -- or I can omit it.
But I like to make sure the archive is complete, so invariably I find
myself laboriously converting these messages to plain English -- again,
something I don't relish, because it takes time, and time is rather
short in my daily life.
Third, it violates a kind of principle of mail communication, which is
that mail (luckily) remains one of the last bastions of plain text on
the network, meaning it can be read by anyone using any kind of
connection to the Internet. HTML-ing it makes it less universal for
those people who have plain-vanilla services available to them. That
means it excludes some readers. Since I'm sure that's not your goal,
you probably don't intend to be exclusive.
So, please give a bit of thought before you send your mail, and make
the effort to send plain text only to the list. It will benefit
readers (including me, who maintains the archive) and it will help
the list (allowing the most complete archive of traffic).
Thanks for your consideration and cooperation on this matter!
--tim
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Nov 12 2001 - 17:21:39 GMT