HTML Linking

[ddm at mclinux.com (Derek Martin)]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Randall Hofland wrote:

> Question:
> 
>     Just why are some offended by HTML links? I find that many in the
> discuss group do send links, some to their own web sites, others to
> links of relevance. That never bothers me (and is often a great
> convenience) but I have noticed some are upset by the linking. SO, is
> this a security issue or just a social/technical preference? Please, no
> flames, just explain the logic. After all, Knowledge is Power!

I've never seen anyone complain about URLs (i.e. http://www.somesite.com)
in an e-mail, but you likely will see people yell about actual HTML in a
message, owing to the fact that many e-mail clients can't format it
legibly, which is extremely annoying if you happen to be using one of
them.

Incidentally, you rarely need to provide an html link of the sort

  <A href="http://www.somesite.com";>click here to go to some site</A>

for your html-capable e-mail client to pick it up as a link... most of the
time, those clients will allow you to click on a link specified as a
simple URL.

Another reason is that these clients, such as Netscape for example, will
also allow you to include both the plain text and the HTML, which is just
silly.  You get two copies of the message, which is nothing but a
bandwitdh hog.


-- 
Derek Martin
System Administrator
Mission Critical Linux
martin at MissionCriticalLinux.com 


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