appropriate formats for email lists

[glen e. p. ropella]

At 05:35 PM 7/18/00 -0600, you wrote:
> run Unix exclusively (Solaris and Linux being the most popular) and
> hence have no facility to read Word documents (unless they've
> installed StarOffice or some other such bloatware); 2) Word documents
> are large with respect to the text that they are actually encoding, an
> ASCII version of the same thing can be around 25-30% of the size, and
> so you save considerably on list bandwidth;
[...]
> While I'm in rant mode ;-) the above comments all apply to folks who
> send mail in HTML format.  Please leave the HTML for those webpages.

Now that's just plain wrong, Alex.  [grin]  HTML isn't significantly
*larger* than ASCII.  It's not hard for unix users to read (Netscape,
Arena, Mozilla, lynx, emacs, etc).  I suppose #3 has some validity;
but, realistically, the unix mail clients should catch up to the
mac and pc clients in their ability to parse marked up code.  But,
it's not *that* valid of an objection since Netscape's mail client
can do it.  And I'm sure emacs can be configured to parse it.

So, while Word is not really appropriate, html is.  That said,
I much prefer ascii as well.

glen

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glen e. p. ropella =><= Hail Eris!
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