HTML in Email

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_armigeron.com>
Date: Sun Feb 6 15:34:21 2000

It was thus said that the Great Peter Pachla once stated:
>
> Hi Sean,
>
> >> Sheesh. Plain text really sucks. Y'all prefer that someone type _like
> >>this_ to indicate a piece of underlined text? or my habit *bolding* with
> >>asterisks? This message "encoded" with HTML is roughly 5% larger than it
> >>is in plain text. Wow, now that's a waste of resources.
>
> Where did this quote come from? I've not seen this message, is my ISP losing
> mail for me again? :-(

  Unless you were on the list in January of 1999, you wouldn't have seen the
message I quoted. Last year this time was a discussion about this very
topic and I just thought it would be interesting to bring it to our
collective attention again.

  I have elm set up to save any outgoing message I send in a folder based
upon the recipient, so everything I write for classiccmp (with a few
exceptions over the past few days) is in one large folder called
``classiccmp.''

> And to whoever actually wrote the above, where on earth did you get that
> figure of 5% from? HTML encoded messages are pretty much *100%* bigger than
> plain text messages - such messages contain TWO copies of the text, one in
> plain ASCII, one in HTML.

  He was saying that HTML *itself* only adds about 5% to plain text.
Perhaps in a few cases that's true, like for hand written HTML, but most of
these so called HTML editors are really bad and bloat the HTML out quite a
bit.

  -spc (You should have seen the HTML reply I sent him back 8-)
Received on Sun Feb 06 2000 - 15:34:21 GMT