From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Mon Apr 22 2002 - 04:21:09 MDT
On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 08:49:36PM -0600, Hermit wrote:
>
> To avoid flooding your mailboxes, with a mark-up style which obviously has some Extropians seething in what appears to me to be an irrational fury, I have not posted the full response to "eugen@leitl.org" here. What I have done is post it on the Virian BBS as Re: virus: Eugene Leitl disses Hermitish markup Reply #6 2002-04-21 at 09:53:38. It can be accessed at the following URL. http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51&action=display&threadid=25392&start=0empted to avoid his ad hominem, have avoided any hint of "Hermitish mark-up" and have simply posted excerpts which relate to his (and other Extropians) obvious difficulties with the Church of Virus.
[ snip ]
Hermit, your email tool isn't wrapping lines properly. This causes
problems for those of us with standards-compliant mail utilities.
Speaking solely for myself, I can say that HTML mail, mail that is
unreadably mangled due to MIME-printed-quotable characters, and mail
that doesn't conform to standards and isn't wrapped to fit an 80-
character terminal window usually goes straight into the bit-bucket:
not due to any irrational ideological hatred of innovation, but
simply because I get roughly 200 email messages a day and can't spare
the time to reformat malformed ones (unless they're essential to my
business).
Discussing improved markup and email usability is a Good Thing, but
the exi-list probably isn't the place for it -- and you should never
underestimate the utility of network externalities, either. Standards
may be dumb or sub-optimal, but they're there, and the convenience
afforded by everybody sticking to an established one outweighs the pain
of shifting to a new one unless it's *very* good indeed. (Hence my
request for dumb ASCII and hard line breaks every 72-79 characters.)
-- Charlie
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