Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Mike Schilling]

"CBFalconer" <cbfalconer at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
news:430D7366.C2126F6D at yahoo.com...
> 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.

Useless except in that it can describe formatting, which is what it would be 
used for?  (

> It also
> interferes with the use of AsciiArt,

Except that it can specify the use of a fixed-width font, which makes Ascii 
Art work.  It can also distinguish between text that can be reformatted for 
flow and text than can not.

So I think you meant to say that it *enables* Ascii Art.

> while opening the recipient to
> the dangers above.

Which is why a formatting-only subset, which doesn't cause any such dangers, 
is required.  As I said above.

Another advantage is that evewry internet-enabled computer today already 
comes with an HTML renderer (AKA browser), so that a message saved to a file 
can be read very easily.