From: Erik Moeller (flagg@oberberg-online.de)
Date: Tue Mar 10 1998 - 17:09:45 MST
>Its sad indeed to see neo-neo-luddites on an extropian mail list who think
>that '7-bit ascii should be enough for anybody'. I think that using HTML
as
>an email standard is an excellent step up in the quality of communication.
>
>Here's words for warning to this reactionary attitude: "Why would anyone
ever
>need more than 640k of RAM?", so sayeth Chairman Bill Gates, in 1981.
>
>As one of the most technophilic mail lists on the net, we should be
>encouraging the use of as high a quality communications medium as possible,
to
>push the standards forward.
Good old Mike, still jumping on every train that has the words 'NEW' on it,
no matter which direction it heads.
HTML postings allow me to
- determine whether you have read a message by me or not, including
information about your browser and operating system,
- execute malign JavaScript code on your machine and exploit documented
bugs in the language which have not yet been fixed in all its
implementations, and especially the mailing programs are a bit slow in
reacting to such issues,
- give mails which would have no content otherwise a cool look to make
them more important. The CAPS LOCK key for the lamers, so to speak.
I dunno whether M$ supports ActiveX in messages, but if they do, that's
another point.
Who needs more than 7-bit to exchange content? The only drawback is German
umlauts and other special characters, which I would have executed once and
for all about 20 years ago anyway. Unicode may offer some new possibilities
here, but HTML for a mailing list is really unnecessary. Did it ever occur
to you that there might still be some people using PINE or stuff like that?
Erik Moeller
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:48:43 MST