Re: HTML: woes

Erik Moeller (flagg@oberberg-online.de)
Wed, 11 Mar 1998 01:09:45 +0100


>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