On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 23:57:28 -0700, Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu gave utterance to the following:
Vicki Rosenzweig wrote:
Plain text was good enough for Dante and Shakespeare, and it's good enough for mailing lists.
_Different people find different things most readable_. Therefore, it makes sense to let the _reader_ decide what colors to display messages in.
So decide, reader. 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.
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).