From: fabian AT cs DOT uct DOT ac DOT za (Fabian Nunez)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Ban HTML postings?
Date: 30 Oct 1998 14:28:46 GMT
Organization: Adamastor
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <71cieu$h0a$1@news.adamastor.ac.za>
References: <199810300322 DOT WAA20999 AT indy DOT delorie DOT com> <3639B657 DOT 6E759728 AT phreaker DOT net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: aji.cs.uct.ac.za
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

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!