Sociology and Message formatting

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_freegate.com>
Date: Thu Jan 7 15:10:52 1999

At 03:12 PM 1/7/99 -0500, Stephen Dauphin wrote:
> ... I think most on the list will agree - ascii or some
>sort of friendly equivalent like iso-Latin.

Stephen's message got me thinking that we were talking about two very
different things. As anyone on this list can tell, I've never sent anything
but plain e-mail this list and won't until the list changes.

Imagine you go to a party, everyone is speaking English but you find two or
three friends you know who speak French. You could stand there and talking
and joking in French while the people around you got annoyed, or you could
speak English like everyone else and be polite. I try to be polite.

My comments on this topic however would be akin to saying, "You know, more
and more people can speak French fluently theses days, I wouldn't be
suprised if the language spoken at these parties will just be French in a
couple of years."

More and more people can both receive HTML and send it these days. Soon
there will be new mailing lists where MOST people send HTML and
occasionally some people send plain text. I don't advocate it for this
list, nor do I mean to offend people who are afraid of this trend. I only
observe it and report.

Respectfully,
--Chuck McManis
Received on Thu Jan 07 1999 - 15:10:52 GMT