Stop posting HTML [was Re: I haev fixed it]

[Dave Angel]

On 1/10/2013 23:33, Michael Torrie wrote:

> On 10/01/2013 08:40 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Tue, 01 Oct 2013 22:02:36 -0400, Joel Goldstick wrote:
>> 
>>> On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 9:52 PM, Steven D'Aprano <
>>> steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Joel, you've been asked repeatedly to please stop posting HTML.
>> [...]
>> 
>>> <br></font></span></blockquote></div><br></div><div
>>> class="gmail_extra">I'm very sorry.  I didn't realize I was.  I
>>> use gmail for this list, and I believe it replies with html if the
>>> previous message was written with html.  I'll be more vigilant.
>> 
>> Not vigilant enough, it seems.
>
> Near as I can tell Gmail is posting the message in both html and plain
> text parts in a multi-part message.
>
> Thunderbird has no problem with the plain text part. That's all I see
> right now, unless I force html view, or look at the message source.

You say that as though you think that makes html posting okay.

The html to text conversion done at posting time frequently loses
something in the message, so that people viewing the text in a
newsreader don't see the same thing the author typed. Simplest example
is color or bold. But the author can avoid using these. More
importantly, indentation and paragraph boundaries are sometimes
completely lost, and worse, sometimes just lost in some places.

Sometimes the html and text are both stuffed into the same part of the
mail message.  This is annoying and misleading.  I don't know if gmail
is guilty of this.

Sometimes a message has html only, and the receiving program
sometimes attempts to convert it to plain text.  That's even more likely
to have problems with formatting.

Whenever html is included, it's a redundant waste of space, and many of
us pay for our internet usage by the kilobyte.  Worse, I assume that all
the archives are also bigger by a big percentage.

-- 
DaveA