[tlug] HTML email [was: Pre-installed linux?]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@??>]

Lyle H Saxon writes:

 > Okay, I like HTML for everything except this list, but I'll switch
 > over to plain text nonetheless.

Thing is, there is absolutely no need for HTML in most email.

Although I personally prefer the typewriter look (for one thing, a lot
of the mail I read contains code), it's very easy to "wash" typical
idioms (generally similar to Wiki markup) into nice-looking fonts, and
Gnus (the Emacs news/mailreader) has been doing so since about 1993 in
versions of Emacs 19.  It's somewhat harder to take typical "hard"
line endings in quoted mail and reflow them, but that's also a
long-solved problem for most common quoting styles.

The only thing I can think of that I'd actually want HTML capabilities
for is something like a New Year's card where I want to flow text
around a fixed, irregular format.

On the other hand, getting code and many other content types common in
email to look good in HTML (without the <pre> element, of course!) is
still rather difficult.

The problem basically comes down to the fact that instead of trying to
make plain text look good, which can be reduced to an algorithm (that
was done by TeX, which is essentially unchanged in this respect since
1983), MUA vendors have preferred to delegate the problem to generally
uninformed and tasteless users and in an inappropriate language, to
boot.