4 Jun
2005
4 Jun
'05
8:45 p.m.
Irony is a bitter mistress. Vim line-wrapped me at 72
characters, whereas Yahoo wraps at 54. I very recently
started to use sendymail, which pipes my text through
the Yahoo web interface, and quite obviously doesn't
run things through fmt before-hand -- hence the nasty
line filling. As such, I've decided to practice what I
preach, and reformat my letter.
I wish I could say it was intentional (the end result
was just too perfect in illustrating the point), but
it was an honest mistake.
Cheers.
-- Travis
On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 12:29:45PM -0700, Quandary
wrote:
On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 12:03:48PM -0500, Rick
Langschultz wrote:
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
I use Outlook XP to compose mail to my boss and
to a support team. I have to use HTML formatting
in my mail messages. Sorry for the inconvenience
I have caused. If people want to get picky about
the mail format and not the content of the
message, they should re-evaluate their purposes
involved in developing code, and material for
computers.
If you've ever tried to read an XML/HTML message in
a plain-text reader (such as mutt, which is my
client of choice), you would understand why folks
complain.
To draw an analogy as to how silly your claim is
(that the formatting should be ignored completely),
consider the following scenarios:
1. A huge C program that works, but has no comments
and obfuscated code.
"If you can't understand it without comments,
you should re-evaluate your programming
ability."
2. A patch that has thousands of formatting changes
intermixed with bugfixes.
"If you can't appreciate the functionality of a
freely offered patch that seems to fix a bug,
you should re-evaluate your stance as a
community-based project."
3. Documentation provided in rendered PS (or
another opaque format).
"If you can't appreciate the accuracy and user-
friendliness of the documentation, you should
re-evaluate your position on having a well-
documented system."
See, these are all silly. It's easy for one side to
just ignore the other -- yes, you may need whatever
formatting HTML provides you for work
correspondence; it's easy for you to forget that
it's even there. Likewise, it's easy for those of
us who edit and send raw text to ignore how
engrained HTML can be in some mail front-ends. But
at the end of the day, the lowest common
denominator is plain-text -- and that's something
folks will expect you to conform to.
Just like a patch with a thousand formatting
changes, now matter how many bugs it fixes, it will
be rejected. So to with your mails -- no matter how
good the merit is, if we have to mind-parse the
gibberish, it's just going to be outright rejected.
Thanks for understanding,
-- Travis
> Rick Langschultz wrote:
>
> > <html xmlns:o=
> > 3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"=
> > xmlns:w=
> > 3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"=
> > xmlns=3D"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
>
> [lots and lots of useless XML tags mixed in an
> unholy cesspool with HTTP snipped]
>
> Could you please trim that crap? I am, as I hope
> the majority of list subscribers are too, not
> especially interested in that you wrote an e-mail
> in MSWord and that your "SpellingState" is
> "Clean".
>
> Please use plain-text only.
>
> Thank you for your cooperation.
>
> /Mike
>