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