Tek 4014/5 emulation

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Fri Jun 16 20:43:14 2000

On Fri, Jun 16, 2000 at 01:53:20PM -0400, William Donzelli wrote:
>No, not at all. The question I posed is if anyone is writing mailers for
>the older systems so they can handle HTML properly.

More importantly, is anyone writing mailers for the newer systems which can
handle plain ASCII text properly? You can't claim to interoperate with other
systems if your system absolutely depends on everyone else having more than
the minimum features required by the RFCs. Anyway, Windows isn't new, it's
been around for ~15 years already... Almost as long as DOS and MacOS, and
longer than Linux or most other current Unix clones (even if they have old
roots).

The main reason HTML is inappropriate for email is that it's a poor fit to
the task of representing plain text. Which, 99% of the time, is all that
appears in an email message (well, except for spam of course, and god forbid
that that not get through). And it contributes hugely to the bloat that we're
getting everywhere. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth or disk space you
have, HTML effectively cuts it in half. And for what real benefit? My inbox
is currently over 6 MB, when I start up the mailer there's a very noticeable
delay before it's even finished *counting* the messages. I'm sick of it!

>Of course, if you want to hind under a rock, you can do that also.

Right!

I really like the line in The Unix Hater's Handbook, where they say that
they were about to say that Unix is stuck in the dark ages of email, but
then they realized that back in the dark ages of computing, network mail
actually *worked*. It's an even better point when applied to Windows.

>I like
>to think that I have a life out side classic computers.

Wha... I don't understand? :-)

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Fri Jun 16 2000 - 20:43:14 BST