Jargons of Info Tech industry

[John Bokma]

bokr at oz.net (Bengt Richter) wrote:

> On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 17:14:45 GMT, Roedy Green
> <my_email_is_posted_on_my_website at munged.invalid> wrote: 
> 
>>On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 08:32:09 -0500, l v <lv at aol.com> wrote or quoted :
>>
>>>I think e-mail should be text only.
> I think that is a useful base standard, which allows easy creation of
> ad-hoc tools to search and extract data from your archives, etc. 
>>
>>I disagree.  Your problem  is spam, not HTML. Spam is associated with
>>HTML and people have in Pavlovian fashion come to hate HTML.
>>
>>But HTML is not the problem!
> Right, it's what the HTML-interpreting engines might do that is
> the problem.

You mean the same problem as for example using a very long header in 
your email to cause a buffer overflow? That is possible with plain 
ASCII, and has been done.

>>That is like hating all choirs because televangelists use them.
>>  
>>HTML allows properly aligned table, diagrams, images, use of
>>colour/fonts to encode speakers. emphasis, hyperlinks.
> All good stuff, but I don't like worrying about side effects when I
> read email.

Then you should ask people to print it out, and use snail mail. Exploits 
in email programs are not happening since HTML was added to them.

>>I try to explain Java each day both on my website on the plaintext
>>only newsgroups. It is so much easier to get my point across in HTML.

> How about pdf?

Ah, and that's exploit free?

>>Program listings are much more readable on my website.
> IMO FOSS pdf could provide all the layout benefits while
> avoiding (allowing for bugs) all the downsides of X/HTML in emails.

Amazing, so one data format that's open is better compared to another 
open data format based on what?

-- 
John                   Small Perl scripts: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
               Perl programmer available:     http://castleamber.com/
                                        I ploink googlegroups.com :-)