Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Mike Schilling]

"Mike Meyer" <mwm at mired.org> wrote in message 
news:86wtmcm1j9.fsf at bhuda.mired.org...
> "Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling at hotmail.com> writes:
>
>> "l v" <lv at aol.com> wrote in message
>> news:1124804082_1011 at spool6-east.superfeed.net...
>>> 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.