Jargons of Info Tech industry

CBFalconer cbfalconer at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 25 04:15:25 EDT 2005


Mike Schilling wrote:
> "Mike Meyer" <mwm at mired.org> wrote in message
>> "Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling at hotmail.com> writes:
>>> "l v" <lv at aol.com> wrote in message
>>>> Xah Lee wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> (circa 1996), and email should be text only (anti-MIME, circa 1995),
>>>>
>>>> I think e-mail should be text only.  I have both my email and
>>>> news readers set to display in plain text only.  It prevents
>>>> the marketeers and spammers from obtaining feedback that my
>>>> email address is valid.  A surprising amount of information
>>>> can be obtained from your computer by allowing HTML and all
>>>> of it's baggage when executing on your computer. Phishing
>>>> comes to my mind first and it works because people click the
>>>> link without looking to see where the link really takes them.
>>>
>>> A formatting-only subset of HTML would be useful for both e-mail
>>> and Usenet posts.
>>
>> Used to be people who wanted to send formatted text via email
>> would use rich text. It never really caught on. But given that
>> most of the people sending around formatted text are using
>> point-n-click GUIs to create the stuff, the main advantage of
>> HTML - that it's easy to write by hand - isn't needed.
> 
> But the other advantage, that it's an existing and popular
> standard, remains.

However, for both e-mail and news, it is totally useless.  It also
interferes with the use of AsciiArt, while opening the recipient to
the dangers above.

-- 
"If you want to post a followup via groups.google.com, don't use
 the broken "Reply" link at the bottom of the article.  Click on 
 "show options" at the top of the article, then click on the 
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