Re: ...what the heck?

[Sean Conner <sean@...>]

It was thus said that the Great Jonathan Goble once stated:
> 
> 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 outdated one.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 handle simple HTML "ridiculously outdated".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.

  This cuts both ways.  If, in 2017, your MUA cannot produce proper
multipart/alternative email messages with text/html and text/plain, then
your MUA is broken and you need to get a proper MUA that can create proper
MIME formatted email.  If tooling on the receiving end should parse HTML to
get plain text, then the tooling on the sending end should generate plain
text in addition to HTML.

  Now, for the record, your (Jonathan Goble's) MUA does that---there is both
a text/html section and a text/plain section and I've never had an issue
reading email from you (yes, I use a terminal-based MUA; I find it faster
and it's not susceptible to tracking images and Javascript based exploits). 
In fact, it's very rare for me to have an issue with email and when it does
happen, it's almost always some braindead web-based MUA that *only*
generates HTML and base-64 encodes it (just to be extra-special).

> Bottom line is that the plain text expectation on this list needs to die,

  That, I do not agree with, but I'll agree to disagree on this point.

  -spc (I have, however, given up on the whole top-posting vs. inline
	reponse and have learned to accept top-posting due to Microsoft
	shoving that down all our throats ... )