Danny Sauer wrote:

>>> (HTML and RTF are for presentation, not communication - if color and
>>> fonts are required, the communicating is being done incorrectly).
>> 
>> That's a pretty major generalization. :)
> 
> One of the few cases where one's accurate. ;)

This may be part of a language barrier, but what's exactly the difference
between presentation and communication for you? 

I myself try to communicate when I present something to an audience, and I
try to present in a pleasant and understandable form what I want to
communicate. To me, both are required for anything worth mentioning to
happen on the channel.

It's difficult to me to imagine a presentation without communication (seems
rather pointless) or a communication without presentation (how exactly do
you communicate in this case?).

IMO the purposeful use of fonts, colors and graphics (and other
"presentation" techniques) can be tremendously useful in communicating.
Whenever I'm in a situation where I can freely choose (other than here,
where I go with the smallest common denominator, so to speak), I use them
-- and I think I make good use of them.


>>> I expect all plain text to be under 80 chars, in fact, and email should
>>> *always* be plain text

Which pretty much requires that the email reader knows how to re-wrap
quoted text appropriately: no matter with what line length you start,
there'll be a point where the quoted text goes over the arbitrary limit.

Point is that the communication channel (smtp, pop3, imap) is limited WRT
line length, the reader's preference is not known, the line length changes
with citation depth, and therefore (that's a UI designer's POV) it would be
silly to make the presentation (and showing text in Courier 11 pt following
the hard breaks in the text /is/ a form of presentation, albeit a quite
crude one) dependent on the insufficiencies of the channel and other
limitations of the situation. But this is exactly the proposition of the
"hard break before <your favorite column number>" crew.


> Yeah, but even that bloated pig :) of an editor/mail reader doesn't put
> in the leading > on wrapped lines, does it?  That was my point - mutt
> wraps lines, too, but it doesn't put the extra >'s in place and I've
> not seen a reader that does.

40tude Dialog doesn't put in the extra > characters by itself, but it
colors the whole paragraph appropriately (I use different colors for
different levels of citation). Makes the missing citation characters a very
minor issue. And if I reply, I can manually re-wrap the citation
paragraphs, and then it fills in the missing citation characters.

All those work-arounds are necessary because of the use of plain text and
hard breaks, of course. A tag system like a simplified HTML (closer to the
original version, with only content type markers) would not require any of
this.

Gerhard

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