"Ken Blake" wrote:
| Chad Harris typed:
| I fail to see why people go nuts when you post in html if it's for a
| good reason. I think html makes it a lot easier to read if you
| use italics, underline or bold correctly. Does it create that much
| of a bandwidth problem?
|
|
| "Going nuts' is perhaps too strong a reaction, but be aware that
| there are several significant problems with html:
|
| 1. Html messages can carry viruses.
|
| 2. Html messages are bigger than text messages, often very much
| bigger. That may not be a problem for you if, for example, you're
| in the USA and have a fast connection. But realize that many
| people use dial-up, either because that's all that's available to
| them where they are, or because they can't afford anything
| faster. Also in many other parts of the world, people pay for
| their internet usage by the minute, and anything that increases
| the size of messages is a great imposition to them.
|
| 3. Everyone's idea of what constitutes an attractive or improved
| html message is different. You may think your html messages are
| beautiful, but someone else might find them unreadable. I once
| had a correspondent who would send me E-mail messages with red
| text on a black background. I could barely make them out.
|
| He finally stopped and switched to text when I threatened to
| killfile him if he didn't. ;-)


Ken,

Well said!

Double irony when visiting these newsgroups whilst using the web interface (CDO):

1. Markup - all HTML/RTF is stripped, so all visual embellishments are lost anyway.

2. Bandwidth - *ten* (10) copies of each post-message are sent to the user's web browser, viz.:-

1 * actual message
1 * // commented-out message
4 * [Reply] messages - one for MSIE 6, one for MSIE 5.5, one for MSIE 5.0 and one for 'other'
4 * [Forward] messages - as above

-and- in each of those 10 copies, almost every non-alphanumeric character is "%-escaped" - each ASCII byte becomes three bytes, and
each UNICODE byte-pair becomes at least five bytes

-and- not to forget all the bloated HTML of the website itself!
---
Jan