Mail Archives: djgpp/1998/10/30/09:36:30
In <3639B657 DOT 6E759728 AT phreaker DOT net> Nicolas Blais <alphaqt AT phreaker DOT net> writes:
>Uhmm, why don't we ban 1999 cars too? I mean, that old, very old 1985
>works just great. Okay, I admit it it's not as good looking as the 1999
>one, but hey, changes are bad! How many people would rather have a
>1999? Now how many people would rather have HTML formatting? Same
>people. (Geez, text in 1998, how low have _they_ sunk?)
>Yep, I think I made my opinion. (No harm intended)
>Nicolas Blais
>DJ Delorie wrote:
>>
>> You know, I could reconfigure my gateway and listserver to reject
>> mail/postings of type text/html or multipart/alternative...
Well, you're obviously one of the lucky ones (like me) who don't have
to pay for our news/mail. If you look at most html-ised news postings
you'll see that they either contain ~20% tags (by volume) or an entire
duplicate of the message body in HTML (as well as the plaintext
version) - 120% extra. This means paying between 20% and 120% more
for being able to keep up with what's happening. The sad thing is
that there is no *need* for this - plain vanilla 7-bit ascii is plenty
for what's discussed here (folks at the alt.binaries.* hierarchy may
disagree ;)
We have developed quite a few tricks over the years to denote
*boldface* /italic/ and _underlined_ text, as well as SAYING THINGS
REAL LOUD (try finding *that* in the HTML reference ;) so even
emphasis is catered for by plain ascii.
I'm all for high-tech, but not when it screws some people over in
order to give others minor advantages.
My 2c
Fabian
--
Fabian Nunez, MSc student Collaborative Visual Computing Laboratory,
fabian AT cs DOT uct DOT ac DOT za University of Cape Town
"Ram Disk" is NOT an installation procedure!
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