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HTML vs text

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 6, 2006 7:20 UTC (Thu) by kingdon (guest, #4526)
In reply to: Thunderbird looks forward by kfiles
Parent article: Thunderbird looks forward

So the problems with HTML mail are probably obvious to most LWN readers (complicated to secure, too many variants of HTML, features which were designed for the web and don't belong in email, intrusive features like <BLINK> and animated images, etc).

But is plain text the right solution? I mean, sure it is for geeks like us, but what about people who want to have their paragraphs wrap (the #1 problem with plain text) and maybe even have a little bold or italics or other light formatting?

I got some email from someone (who I think is using a Mac) in text/enriched (RFC1896) format. Is it worth popularizing this? It might be a better solution than telling people to just go to plain text, but I don't know if it is *too* plain to interest anyone who isn't using plain text now.

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HTML vs text

Posted Apr 6, 2006 9:28 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

what about people who want to have their paragraphs wrap

I might misunderstand you, but the following header
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
doesn't solve this problem? The pine help mentions RFC3676 where this is specified.

Bye,NAR

HTML vs text

Posted Apr 18, 2006 12:47 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Where's the problem with light formating? *bold* and /italic/, even
_underline_ works fine in a newsreader like knode. It's supposed to work
in mails, too. What's the difficulty to add a similar renderer to the
mail tool and set to a common standard for ASCII formatting?

* bullet point

- enumerate

> quote

Seems all to be too obvious.


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