Speaking of mail etc

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Some good points brought up about poor quoting habits by users of "rtf" email.

I'm left asking, though, whether such points are relevant to my main
conclusion:  that plain-text email is going to fade considerably in the coming
years.

As an example, I see a *lot* of html mail getting posted to one of my favorite
techie lists (nanog), one where I would've expected peer pressure would have
excluded such items.  (You don't see those very often here on BLU, because
such submitters get shouted down quickly.)  The list software can't parse
them, so you get all these =20, =3D, and html tags.

My other point, besides the fact that a lot of recent arrivals to net email
are using Outlook to generate html mail, is that the only standard interchange
formats available are:  rtf, doc, pdf, html.  Html will win out because the
others have a proprietary taint.

Improvements to composition editors (and perhaps mailing-list parsers) could
address some of the concerns about sloppy quotations.  For example, a mailing
list parser could make a simple comparison of a new submission with previous
ones, and kick back anything with an "I've already seen that text" error if
more than say 40% of a submission contains quoted text, or a "too many
colors/fonts" error if a user gets too fancy.

-rich