On 19-Aug-23 10:50, Kyle Rose wrote:
My guidance in general would be "maintain flexibility". Times change, and so do tools and conventions. I would much rather use a tool made for revision control (e.g., GitHub) than email for handling text for which formatting is semantic. But to one specific point:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 4:59 PM Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
- And of course some people insist on sending HTML mail
and assume that the result will be legible and
comprehensible despite the fact that they use colours
and fonts and font sizes that are unsuitable for many
readers and/or their MUAs. A conversation that consists
of a mixture of plain text and HTML messages rapidly
becomes a swamp.
That ship has sailed. Long ago. If you use a MUA that can't present HTML email in a readable form, your MUA is broken. It doesn't matter what the standards say: this is purely a matter of practical interoperability.
Of course. I tried to avoid talk of standards in my OP. But to your point, the mess doesn't arise from an MUA being unable to present HTML mail; it arises when a mail thread alternates between authors generating plain text and HTML, such that the message becomes very hard to read and often it's very hard to see who wrote what. In general, different behaviour by different MUAs creates confusion, and the HTML v plain text issue makes it worse. And my perception is that the problem set *is* getting worse, and I'm seeing more and more threads degenerate to the point that they become incomprehensible.
Example: above, you quote me with indentation but no prefixed ">". My MUA prefixes that with a single ">". So one or two more steps down the chain, somebody will be unable to be sure which of us wrote what.
If people are happy to tolerate this type of thing and the confusion that it causes, fine, but it sure makes "we decide everything by email" harder.
Brian
