A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Ben Finney]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003 15:16:48 +0100, Alan Kennedy wrote:
> Ben Finney wrote:
>> Which quickly leads to "You must use $BROWSER to view this site". 
>> No thanks.
> 
> No, that's the precise opposite of the point I was making. My position
> is "You must use markup-capable software to perceive what I've
> written. Your choice of software is entirely up to you: the only
> requirement is the ability to process (x|ht)ml". I try to avoid
> platform/language/os/browser dependent anything: that was the whole
> point of the post.

You also stipulated "... from a Usenet post".  Most Usenet readers do
not handle markup, nor should they.  There are many benefits from the
fact that posts are plain text, readable by any software that can handle
character streams; parsing a markup tree for an article is a whole order
of complexity that I'd rather not have in my newsreader.

Expecting people to use a news reader that attempts to parse markup and
render the result, is like expecting people to use an email reader that
attempts to parse markup and render ther result.  Don't.

-- 
 \            "I was in the grocery store. I saw a sign that said 'pet |
  `\      supplies'. So I did. Then I went outside and saw a sign that |
_o__)                          said 'compact cars'."  -- Steven Wright |
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