On Jan 18, 2008, at 1:53 PM, Ed Barkmeyer wrote:
> I agree with Pat that the fact that some individuals lack taste is
> not a reason for dispensing with HTML (or cars, or clothes). (01)
I agree in general; HTML mail, used judiciously, can be very useful.
But, until fairly recently, that wasn't the main problem with sending
HTML mail to mailing lists. The real problem lay in the fact that the
bodies of *archived* msgs for mailing lists were simply displayed as
raw text making HTML-formatted msgs nigh unreadable -- esp msgs that
were sent packaged in the utterly ghastly HTML (still) spewed out by
Microsoft MUAs. Lately, however, archiving programs for the most part
have gotten much smarter about preparing an archive for viewing on the
web so that its msgs are properly rendered. This is true in
particular of the Ontolog archives, thankfully. (02)
> P.S. The current crop of exploiters are not about selling your address
> book to porn spammers and Chinese retailers, or poisoning your machine
> operation, or sending you to their favorite advertisers. The current
> technology searches your files for Tax Ids, and monitors your
> keystrokes
> when you are connected to a financial site, or an online retailer's
> checkout sequence. The Internet is more dangerous in 2008 than it was
> in 1998. And active HTML, on a predictable unprotected platform, made
> all this possible. (03)
Indeed. I'm not above being an ideologue about OSes, but ideology
aside, the virtual absence of this sort of malware on Mac and Linux
platforms is perhaps the most powerful argument for switching to one
or the other. (04)
-chris (05)
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