Re: ...what the heck?

[Francisco Olarte <folarte@...>]

Johnatan:

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 10:45 PM, Jonathan Goble <jcgoble3@gmail.com> wrote:


> Unlike many of you, I don't work in an office in front of a computer all
> day. I bag groceries for minimum wage. So programming is just a hobby for
> me.

I told you not to take it personally, anyway:

> There are frequently days when I go many hours without access to my
> computer, so sometimes I must send emails from my phone. The reply you quote
> below, for example, was sent while sitting in the break room at work, with
> five more hours of work ahead of me and then other things needing done after
> that before I would have time to get on my computer. Yesterday, I sent an
> email (not to this list) at 10am that I would have preferred to send from my
> computer, but I had a very busy day away from the house, so I knew I
> wouldn't have computer access until after midnight that night. So I sent it
> from my phone instead.

I understand you sometimes can only send from your phone, and I
assumed you did not choose phone over computer having both by dice
toss, or to annoy me. But you did not need to send it from the break
room, in fact I doubt you did even need to send it. Or you could hav
waited for midnight, as you state. As I do not need to send this, I
just want to do it, but nothing harmless would have happened had I
omitted it.


> The real issue here, IMO, is that people here are demanding plain text only
> in 2017. All good MUAs in 2017 can handle simple HTML gracefully. If one
> doesn't, then it's not a good MUA, precisely because it is 2017. If you
> require emails to be sent as plain text in order to be able to read them,
> you have a tooling problem that is your responsibility to fix. It is not
> reasonable to force other people on a mailing list to forgo their preferred,
> modern MUA just so you can continue to use a ridiculously outdated one. And
> yes, I consider any MUA in 2017 that cannot gracefully handle simple HTML
> "ridiculously outdated". Even a terminal-based MUA ought to be capable of
> parsing simple HTML these days and gracefully reducing it to plain text on
> your client's side.

Of course my MUAs handle fairly complex HTML without a problem, and
event much more complex beasts. And the plain text is not what bothers
me. What really annoys me is the full message bottom quoting. This was
pioneered, IIRC, by outlook on the mid 90s, become popular and has
made the mailing lists much harder to read since then. And bottom
quoting is much easier to avoid when using a good HTML MUA than with a
plain text one ( the one I'm using, gmail web, is quite good at
reading rich HTML, but nearly useless to write it, this is one of the
reasons I nearly always use plain text, to save the rest of the
readers from the ugly results of gmail composer ).

I do not try to force anyone to forgo they mua, although I assume any
non outdatet MUA is equally capable of producing plain text ( mines do
at least ).


> Bottom line is that the plain text expectation on this list needs to die,
> and I'm done jumping through hoops to send as plain text on this list. If
> you can't read simple HTML in 2017, then you have a problem that is not my
> responsibility to fix.

I do not expect plain text on the list. AAMOF I've been using MUAS
which can process complex HTML for more than 20 years, and before that
HTML was simple enough to just read the source ( as people tended
touse more semantic markup and use few images and effects ). And rest
assured I'm not expecting you to fix my problems.

Anyway, enough. Send as you wish, I'll read as I wish. ( not too sure
on that construction, excuse my english ).

Francisco Olarte.