Re: MIME/HTML mail, was Re: SSH tunneling / X forwarding

From: Nico Kadel-Garcia (nkadel@verizon.net)
Date: 03/30/03

  • Next message: William Hooper: "Re: MIME/HTML mail, was Re: SSH tunneling / X forwarding" 
    From: Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@verizon.net>
Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2003 16:58:42 GMT

    Richard E. Silverman wrote:

    > As an aside, this is the first time someone has mentioned a restriction to
    > ASCII, as opposed to just disliking HTML or MIME. This is even worse,
    > since ASCII is really only (barely) adequate for writing English. There
    > are a few thousand other languages on Earth, the last time I checked.

    Unfortunately, Richard, there is not yet a robust way to display the
    subtleties of many other languages. Unicode has not taken the world by
    storm, and is still unavailable for many applications. Non-ASCII is a
    painfully bad idea for many forms of documentation or writing: they make
    parsing or translating it for replication or, for example, text-speech
    systems for the visually impaired quite difficult.

    We can go back to the days of calligraphic ornamentation of the simplest
    documents, or we can keep our bandwidth a lot lower and disk space a
    *lot* lower by using a wildly more efficient technique. It's not
    appropriate for everything, but you may notice that the ideographic
    languages are being lost and even Kanji writing is fading out in favor
    of ASCII.

    > mdk> To tell the truth, there is nothing I wish from a newsgroup that
    > mdk> cannot be well-expressed in words by a literate writer.
    >
    > Your unsubtle implication here is that anyone who wants more than ASCII
    > for writing is not a good enough writer, or illiterate. As a literate and
    > professional writer myself, I disagree. Oddly enough, so does a few
    > thousand years' practice of writing by people and cultures all over the
    > planet.

    Well, there's nothing he wants. He's probably missing some fairly cool
    stuff, and it's his loss. HTML and other binary formats do have their
    uses, but I still feel they shouldn't be de facto standards. Just as
    poetry doesn't normally require a bathtub of brightly colored machine
    tools, newsgroups and email don't normally require binary forats.

  • Next message: William Hooper: "Re: MIME/HTML mail, was Re: SSH tunneling / X forwarding"

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