[Mailman-Users] text-only versus graphical

[LuKreme]

On 20-Nov-2006, at 15:24, Daevid Vincent wrote:
> I don't know why everyone is all down on graphical HTML email.

Because everyone thinks they are a grapahic designer and most people  
have the design sense of a 4yo ADHD kid.  Not to mention turning a  
10K newsletter into a 500K mess of HTML that is, frankly, unlikely to  
come through unscathed anyway.

> I think this "plain-text" only mentality is antiquated and fostered  
> from
> die-hard zealots who still use, nigh, prefer the command line over  
> GUI tools
> which take most of the tedious guess-work and fat-fingering out of
> administration of a server.

Oh, there's certainly some of that. But that's not all of it.  For  
example, I don't like having my mail window be the width of my  
screen, and the pane I read mail in is only about 600px wide.  Most  
HTML-ized email assumes that I will be giving it at the very least  
800px, and more like 1200px.  This makes most HTML email immediately  
unreadable for me.

I get some HTML email (AMC channel, BBCAmerica) but I usually just  
read the plain text alts because there's nothing in the HTML I care  
about. If I do care, I can view the html easily (and quite well,  
Apple's Mail.app does HTML better than any other MUA I've ever seen).

The other big issue is I can zip through 50 emails in less than 50  
seconds if it's all text.  With HTML, the rendering alone will slow  
me down considerably (I often do this to scan a thread I think I am  
not likely to be interested in... just to see if anything pops up).

-- 
You know, in a world in which Bush and Blair can be nominated for the  
Nobel Peace Prize, "for having dared to take the necessary decision  
to launch a war on Iraq without having the support of the UN" I find  
myself agreeing with Tom Lehrer: satire is dead. - Neil Gaiman