Richard Grevers wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
Choose to view SV's messages in plain text (that's what I do), or tell your HTML interpreter to override his colour settings.
I know of at least two email clients in which the latter is impossible - if you choose to view html it's all or nothing.
These were written by Micro$oft, weren't they? ^_^
While I find SV's decision to specify colour unnecessarily provocative, the fact is that he isn't forcing anything on any reader.
I find Microsoft's decision to release a buggy email client unnecessaily provocative. As I have said before, I am not so concerned about the effect on people's reading choice that HTML has, I'm concerned that posting HTML or multipart to the list can make the digest version and/or any text archive of the list unreadable. (I'm on so many mailing lists that I forget which one is on which software, but IIRC we're on GNU Mailman, which is affected).
This page from our archive, http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2003-June/004761.html, is perfectly readable. You get Steve's message in text, then ignore the HTML gibberish.
I also read the digest version just fine, without ever seeing a speck of HTML. Then again, I do use a decent mail reader, which correctly interprets the MIME; perhaps Micro$oft's readers don't do this.
Anyway, I don't mean to defend Steve's actions. Posting in HTML in the first place is a lousy idea, much less specifying the colours that you send. (If Steve wants to specify the colours that he /reads/, then let him, but that's a different matter entirely.) But I do mean to say that (to borrow from another thread) he can't /make/ anybody read his messages in lousy colours.
-- Toby