i am still hoping that ical 2.0 comes out soon. i find ical to be pretty darn slow, even on my old dual 1 ghz quicksilver, after it had been in use for a while.
plus, i can't stand the way they put the colored gradients behind the text for calendar events. am i the only one who finds that hard to read compared to, say, a flat color? my one hope is that apple seems to be realizing this in panther, where the labels on items are a solid flat color, so there may be a change to that in the near future. they have also started changing the web buttons on apple's website to flat colored buttons as well.
unfortunately, i still think isync bites when dealing with palm-based devices, but i blame damn hotsync for CONSTANTLY trying to butt in whenever i sync. of course, if someone would just buy me an ipod, i wouldn't have to waste precious message board space on such triviata.
Might be answered already, but does next version of Mail support composing HTML based email? Plain text email is wack.
In principle, I like the idea of formatted email.
Yet in practice it seems there are font size issues with all of the formatted email that I receive. Other passages of text by multiple authors don't seem to cause such problems. The thing with email though is that you typically browse through an entire batch of email at one time, rapidly switching between text from different authors. Thus, formatting issues become more significant, having to read things at a difficult size or constantly adjusting the view preferences.
Any efficiency or pleasure derived from pretty or differentiated email is more than offset by the inefficiency of improper text size and formatting.
I prefer plain text email because the whole benefit of email arises from its ubiquity, and every attempt to "enhance" it simply means that you have to start worrying about who the recipient is and what they have.
I've sent email to ancient mainframe computers at small colleges, and to pagers, without knowing and without caring. It just works, 100% of the time, with none of the incompatibilities, bandwidth waste (and, in the case of HTML email, security and privacy issues) that plague rich "email". More than once I've had to send data to researchers from my account because the person who actually compiled the data has Outlook set to send rich text, and the person on the other end gets a big, unusable jumble of RTF formatting.
It's just not worth the trouble to me. Email was designed to be a plain text medium, and that's the only format that's guaranteed to work.
I go one step further and am loathed to send attachments (and hate those who send unsolicited attachments). "Here, watch this funny movie (sends 18MB MPEG movie)." Die, die DIE!!!
Yah, I like good old plain text email too...for all the same reasons.
It just works.
The only time I send rich text mail to other people is when I know that they can view it, and I'm not super-duper hung up on the formatting. If formatting is important I'll do it as a PDF.
Mail is going to have to get pretty darned spiffy before I move off of Entourage, but I continue to wait and watch~
I go one step further and am loathed to send attachments (and hate those who send unsolicited attachments). "Here, watch this funny movie (sends 18MB MPEG movie)." Die, die DIE!!!
Uh, this is an user issue. The problem is that you know too many pople who send you (big) attachments. They are the idiots that you should be stopping and not users out there who want advanced/prettily formatted e-mails.
Uh, this is an user issue. The problem is that you know too many pople who send you (big) attachments. They are the idiots that you should be stopping and not users out there who want advanced/prettily formatted e-mails.
Do what I do. Find a file 10x the size of the one they sent you, and send it to them as an attachment with a note stating that sending a URL is much less annoying.
To you maybe but otherwise not a convincing argument. Web too was designed to be a plain text medium as well.
Actually, no.
Pre-W3 HTML contained formatting and media tags. From day one it was designed as a right medium. Email was not.
I'm with Amorph... until >99.9% of the email reception clients can handle XHTML (preferably with client-side CSS style decisions)*, email should remain text by default to be optimally useful.
* This doesn't mean that every client needs to display rich CSS content - what it means is that a client can choose based on the CSS tags *what* content to display, and even *how* (visual, audio, etc). That's the big win of XHTML/CSS... then even pagers can display email in a format appropriate to their capabilities.
Pre-W3 HTML contained formatting and media tags. From day one it was designed as a right medium. Email was not.
Actually, yes. I was surfing the web prior to 1992 before any media tags (i.e. IMG) existing as part of HTML specification.
The fact is that all mail clients can compose and read plain text. If you want to send 100% plain text e-mails, that is your perogative - no one is telling you not to nor telling you that you cannot. On the otherhand, if you do not want to receive non-text e-mails, it is your obligation to tell the sending party to change their ways and their perogative to decide whether or not to do it!
Saying that ANY technology standard/platform/protocol was designed right at day one is just silly.
Actually, yes. I was surfing the web prior to 1992 before any media tags (i.e. IMG) existing as part of HTML specification.
It's always nice to see another old NeXTie. You're right, IMG wasn't added to HTML until Dec '92. My bad. Since Berners-Lee's main focus was high energy physics document sharing (which tend to have plenty of images) this seemed like a no-brainer.
Quote:
The fact is that all mail clients can compose and read plain text. If you want to send 100% plain text e-mails, that is your perogative - no one is telling you not to nor telling you that you cannot. On the otherhand, if you do not want to receive non-text e-mails, it is your obligation to tell the sending party to change their ways and their perogative to decide whether or not to do it!
Indeed. And I have had senders tell me flat out "Sorry, I only send out Word documents. No one *else* seems to have a problem." As email. As the body of the email. Stupid? Yup. (The winner is still someone who, to send me four .jpgs placed them in an Excel table, inside a Word document, and sent *that*. She couldn't figure out why I thought this was a problem.)
To me, sending HTML as email isn't really much different than sending .doc files. 95% of the computers can read it just *fine* after all, so who cares about the other 5%? Let them complain, and then maybe the sender will change...
Quote:
Saying that ANY technology standard/platform/protocol was designed right at day one is just silly.
Saying that ANY technology standard/platform/protocol was designed right at day one is just silly.
Who said it was designed right at day one? That's tendentious and silly.
It was designed, and became popular, and remains popular, as a text-only means of communication. Therefore it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication. Whether the design is optimal is irrelevant. It is, and it's everywhere. My complaints with rich text email have nothing to do with some bias against rich text (or multimedia) and everything to do with real-world experience with various implementations built on top of basic email, all of which have fallen down with various degrees of severity at various times in my own experience.
The Web, on the other hand, became popular as a rich medium. You can fiddle with things while there's a tiny installed base, but once it goes mainstream, the design is pretty much frozen, and change becomes glacial and difficult. When was CSS finalized again?
From day one it [Pre-W3 HTML] was designed as a right medium.
**********
Quote:
Originally posted by Amorph
That's tendentious and silly.
It was designed, and became popular, and remains popular, as a text-only means of communication. Therefore it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication. Whether the design is optimal is irrelevant. It is, and it's everywhere. My complaints with rich text email have nothing to do with some bias against rich text (or multimedia) and everything to do with real-world experience with various implementations built on top of basic email, all of which have fallen down with various degrees of severity at various times in my own experience.
The Web, on the other hand, became popular as a rich medium. You can fiddle with things while there's a tiny installed base, but once it goes mainstream, the design is pretty much frozen, and change becomes glacial and difficult. When was CSS finalized again?
The logic does not flow. E-mail was designed as text-only so it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication, you argued. Web was also designed as text only and does it cease to function reliably once non-text objects were added? How about books? I know I am being argumentative here but reliablity in this case has nothing to do with the original design.
But in any case, feel free to use and advocate the use of plain text e-mail/web as much as you want. It's your choice. However, if other "various implementations built on top of basic e-mail" are causing you problems, there is clearly a solution: get them to send you basic plain text! It is as if they do not have a choice. They do and sent you information in a format you do not like - this is different than e-mail being unreliable.
****
Offtopic here... "tendentious", that's a good word! Have to use it today.
The logic does not flow. E-mail was designed as text-only so it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication, you argued. Web was also designed as text only and does it cease to function reliably once non-text objects were added? How about books?
I think we're a bit off a constructive discussion on the merits and technical issues associated with various email formats... but i'll bite.
I think the difference is that email's poorly specified standards were well-entrenched prior to the addition of formatting and embedded images.
On the other hand, html and other web technologies gained widespread use only after formatting and image capabilities were added. Also, given the extensible nature of the <tag></tag> structure, the bastardization of web standards was easier to accomplish.
Of course there are also issues like the number of viewers written for mail as compared to the number written for web content. There are literally thousands of email programs still in use. To make matters worse, the parsing and transmission of a web document is far simpler than for messages. Layout, no, but transmission and parsing yes. Hell, even line-wrap is an unspecified mess with email.
Books? Well their new formats and images are backwards compatible with all legacy viewing hardware.
Discussion of technology aside, I'm still in favor of plain text email.
<ironic bold-face/>Aren't you glad audio effects and transmission volume aren't standard telephony options?
The logic does not flow. E-mail was designed as text-only so it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication, you argued. Web was also designed as text only and does it cease to function reliably once non-text objects were added? How about books? I know I am being argumentative here but reliablity in this case has nothing to do with the original design.
The logic doesn't flow because you're not following it. The crucial point is not the original design, but the design that's in place at the time the technology is widely adopted - because that's when legacy becomes both important and constraining. The web was widely adopted as a pictures-and-text medium, and in fact it has struggled to evolve far beyond the technologies that it went mainstream with - most major sites still use tables and presentation-based markup. I myself have an XHTML version of my band's webpage sitting idly on my hard drive because I still have to answer to the expectations of IE 3 and NS 4. What the ur-web looked like matters as little to the modern web as bangpaths matter to the modern Internet. The audience was so small that upgrading them to the next thing was a simple and painless task. Upgrading the web since NS 2, on the other hand, is a different matter.
Email was widely adopted when it was still plain text. Now, believe me, I'd be much happier if it hadn't caught on until we had UTF-8 and some form of formatting beyond creative use of splats and slashes, but that's not what happened. It took long enough just to get MIME out there (even now, not all email clients out there can handle MIME). So, as I initially said, if you want email to just work, send plain text. It's not a "personal preference." It's the only form of email that just works, for better or for worse. That's a simple, empirical fact.
Quote:
But in any case, feel free to use and advocate the use of plain text e-mail/web as much as you want. It's your choice. However, if other "various implementations built on top of basic e-mail" are causing you problems, there is clearly a solution: get them to send you basic plain text!
In the first place, this is needless complexity. Email can just work, so it should just work. More to your point, however, most people don't even understand what the problem is. In one of the cases where I saved the day by using plain text email, the person trying to send data came to me for help because he thought Outlook was sending plain text - after all, that's what he'd pasted in, and he hadn't added any formatting. The second time, he made it look like plain text by changing the font to Courier, which (needless to say) didn't work. This is not Joe Sixpack, either, it's a statistician who is quite fluent with a number of sophisticated pieces of software. Outlook needlessly complicates the problem, and buries the nature and source of the complexity to boot. This is not my problem, nor is it the problem of the researcher on the other end, receiving email on an old machine. It's a problem of Outlook's design, and one that Outlook punts the user with no guidance, nor any hint that there's a problem at all.
Furthermore, do you honestly expect people to go to the trouble of resetting Outlook in order to send me an email, and then setting it back? I can tell you from experience: Doesn't happen. I'd be surprised if most of the people who send me rich text even know how to, and I couldn't blame the rest for not digging around in preferences (or is it options? settings? hmmm) just to please one guy. I note that MS' monopoly is mostly built on the fact that people don't like going to extra trouble, but they don't mind if they make someone else go to extra trouble ("You can't read my paper? Dude, upgrade already!").
Then there are the people who send me HTML email because that's the only option (in the case of one person with a webmail account).
Comments
plus, i can't stand the way they put the colored gradients behind the text for calendar events. am i the only one who finds that hard to read compared to, say, a flat color? my one hope is that apple seems to be realizing this in panther, where the labels on items are a solid flat color, so there may be a change to that in the near future. they have also started changing the web buttons on apple's website to flat colored buttons as well.
unfortunately, i still think isync bites when dealing with palm-based devices, but i blame damn hotsync for CONSTANTLY trying to butt in whenever i sync. of course, if someone would just buy me an ipod, i wouldn't have to waste precious message board space on such triviata.
Originally posted by dhype55
Might be answered already, but does next version of Mail support composing HTML based email? Plain text email is wack.
No. Just rich text.
Originally posted by dhype55
Might be answered already, but does next version of Mail support composing HTML based email? Plain text email is wack.
In principle, I like the idea of formatted email.
Yet in practice it seems there are font size issues with all of the formatted email that I receive. Other passages of text by multiple authors don't seem to cause such problems. The thing with email though is that you typically browse through an entire batch of email at one time, rapidly switching between text from different authors. Thus, formatting issues become more significant, having to read things at a difficult size or constantly adjusting the view preferences.
Any efficiency or pleasure derived from pretty or differentiated email is more than offset by the inefficiency of improper text size and formatting.
Yes I prefer plain text email.
I've sent email to ancient mainframe computers at small colleges, and to pagers, without knowing and without caring. It just works, 100% of the time, with none of the incompatibilities, bandwidth waste (and, in the case of HTML email, security and privacy issues) that plague rich "email". More than once I've had to send data to researchers from my account because the person who actually compiled the data has Outlook set to send rich text, and the person on the other end gets a big, unusable jumble of RTF formatting.
It's just not worth the trouble to me. Email was designed to be a plain text medium, and that's the only format that's guaranteed to work.
I go one step further and am loathed to send attachments (and hate those who send unsolicited attachments). "Here, watch this funny movie (sends 18MB MPEG movie)." Die, die DIE!!!
I wish there was a better (but secure) mechanism.
Screed
It just works.
The only time I send rich text mail to other people is when I know that they can view it, and I'm not super-duper hung up on the formatting. If formatting is important I'll do it as a PDF.
Mail is going to have to get pretty darned spiffy before I move off of Entourage, but I continue to wait and watch~
Originally posted by sCreeD
I go one step further and am loathed to send attachments (and hate those who send unsolicited attachments). "Here, watch this funny movie (sends 18MB MPEG movie)." Die, die DIE!!!
Uh, this is an user issue. The problem is that you know too many pople who send you (big) attachments. They are the idiots that you should be stopping and not users out there who want advanced/prettily formatted e-mails.
Originally posted by Amorph
It's just not worth the trouble to me. Email was designed to be a plain text medium, and that's the only format that's guaranteed to work.
To you maybe but otherwise not a convincing argument. Web too was designed to be a plain text medium as well.
Originally posted by klinux
Uh, this is an user issue. The problem is that you know too many pople who send you (big) attachments. They are the idiots that you should be stopping and not users out there who want advanced/prettily formatted e-mails.
Do what I do. Find a file 10x the size of the one they sent you, and send it to them as an attachment with a note stating that sending a URL is much less annoying.
Works *beautifully* if they're on POP.
Originally posted by klinux
To you maybe but otherwise not a convincing argument. Web too was designed to be a plain text medium as well.
Actually, no.
Pre-W3 HTML contained formatting and media tags. From day one it was designed as a right medium. Email was not.
I'm with Amorph... until >99.9% of the email reception clients can handle XHTML (preferably with client-side CSS style decisions)*, email should remain text by default to be optimally useful.
* This doesn't mean that every client needs to display rich CSS content - what it means is that a client can choose based on the CSS tags *what* content to display, and even *how* (visual, audio, etc). That's the big win of XHTML/CSS... then even pagers can display email in a format appropriate to their capabilities.
Originally posted by Kickaha
Actually, no.
Pre-W3 HTML contained formatting and media tags. From day one it was designed as a right medium. Email was not.
Actually, yes. I was surfing the web prior to 1992 before any media tags (i.e. IMG) existing as part of HTML specification.
The fact is that all mail clients can compose and read plain text. If you want to send 100% plain text e-mails, that is your perogative - no one is telling you not to nor telling you that you cannot. On the otherhand, if you do not want to receive non-text e-mails, it is your obligation to tell the sending party to change their ways and their perogative to decide whether or not to do it!
Saying that ANY technology standard/platform/protocol was designed right at day one is just silly.
Originally posted by klinux
Actually, yes. I was surfing the web prior to 1992 before any media tags (i.e. IMG) existing as part of HTML specification.
It's always nice to see another old NeXTie. You're right, IMG wasn't added to HTML until Dec '92. My bad. Since Berners-Lee's main focus was high energy physics document sharing (which tend to have plenty of images) this seemed like a no-brainer.
The fact is that all mail clients can compose and read plain text. If you want to send 100% plain text e-mails, that is your perogative - no one is telling you not to nor telling you that you cannot. On the otherhand, if you do not want to receive non-text e-mails, it is your obligation to tell the sending party to change their ways and their perogative to decide whether or not to do it!
Indeed. And I have had senders tell me flat out "Sorry, I only send out Word documents. No one *else* seems to have a problem." As email. As the body of the email. Stupid? Yup. (The winner is still someone who, to send me four .jpgs placed them in an Excel table, inside a Word document, and sent *that*. She couldn't figure out why I thought this was a problem.)
To me, sending HTML as email isn't really much different than sending .doc files. 95% of the computers can read it just *fine* after all, so who cares about the other 5%? Let them complain, and then maybe the sender will change...
Saying that ANY technology standard/platform/protocol was designed right at day one is just silly.
Typo. I meant to type 'rich' media. Not right.
Originally posted by klinux
Saying that ANY technology standard/platform/protocol was designed right at day one is just silly.
Who said it was designed right at day one? That's tendentious and silly.
It was designed, and became popular, and remains popular, as a text-only means of communication. Therefore it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication. Whether the design is optimal is irrelevant. It is, and it's everywhere. My complaints with rich text email have nothing to do with some bias against rich text (or multimedia) and everything to do with real-world experience with various implementations built on top of basic email, all of which have fallen down with various degrees of severity at various times in my own experience.
The Web, on the other hand, became popular as a rich medium. You can fiddle with things while there's a tiny installed base, but once it goes mainstream, the design is pretty much frozen, and change becomes glacial and difficult. When was CSS finalized again?
Originally posted by Amorph
Who said it was designed right at day one?
Originally posted by Kickaha
From day one it [Pre-W3 HTML] was designed as a right medium.
**********
Originally posted by Amorph
That's tendentious and silly.
It was designed, and became popular, and remains popular, as a text-only means of communication. Therefore it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication. Whether the design is optimal is irrelevant. It is, and it's everywhere. My complaints with rich text email have nothing to do with some bias against rich text (or multimedia) and everything to do with real-world experience with various implementations built on top of basic email, all of which have fallen down with various degrees of severity at various times in my own experience.
The Web, on the other hand, became popular as a rich medium. You can fiddle with things while there's a tiny installed base, but once it goes mainstream, the design is pretty much frozen, and change becomes glacial and difficult. When was CSS finalized again?
The logic does not flow. E-mail was designed as text-only so it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication, you argued. Web was also designed as text only and does it cease to function reliably once non-text objects were added? How about books? I know I am being argumentative here but reliablity in this case has nothing to do with the original design.
But in any case, feel free to use and advocate the use of plain text e-mail/web as much as you want. It's your choice. However, if other "various implementations built on top of basic e-mail" are causing you problems, there is clearly a solution: get them to send you basic plain text! It is as if they do not have a choice. They do and sent you information in a format you do not like - this is different than e-mail being unreliable.
****
Offtopic here... "tendentious", that's a good word! Have to use it today.
Originally posted by klinux
The logic does not flow. E-mail was designed as text-only so it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication, you argued. Web was also designed as text only and does it cease to function reliably once non-text objects were added? How about books?
I think we're a bit off a constructive discussion on the merits and technical issues associated with various email formats... but i'll bite.
I think the difference is that email's poorly specified standards were well-entrenched prior to the addition of formatting and embedded images.
On the other hand, html and other web technologies gained widespread use only after formatting and image capabilities were added. Also, given the extensible nature of the <tag></tag> structure, the bastardization of web standards was easier to accomplish.
Of course there are also issues like the number of viewers written for mail as compared to the number written for web content. There are literally thousands of email programs still in use. To make matters worse, the parsing and transmission of a web document is far simpler than for messages. Layout, no, but transmission and parsing yes. Hell, even line-wrap is an unspecified mess with email.
Books? Well their new formats and images are backwards compatible with all legacy viewing hardware.
Discussion of technology aside, I'm still in favor of plain text email.
<ironic bold-face/>Aren't you glad audio effects and transmission volume aren't standard telephony options?
Originally posted by dfiler
Books? Well their new formats and images are backwards compatible with all legacy viewing hardware.
Me legacy viewing hardware is using a plug-in. (I wear eyeglasses.)
Originally posted by klinux
Me legacy viewing hardware is using a plug-in. (I wear eyeglasses.)
Actually, this is a known hardware issue with your generation of rev A machines. Qualified technicians can fix that for you.
Originally posted by klinux
The logic does not flow. E-mail was designed as text-only so it functions most reliably as a text-only means of communication, you argued. Web was also designed as text only and does it cease to function reliably once non-text objects were added? How about books? I know I am being argumentative here but reliablity in this case has nothing to do with the original design.
The logic doesn't flow because you're not following it.
Email was widely adopted when it was still plain text. Now, believe me, I'd be much happier if it hadn't caught on until we had UTF-8 and some form of formatting beyond creative use of splats and slashes, but that's not what happened. It took long enough just to get MIME out there (even now, not all email clients out there can handle MIME). So, as I initially said, if you want email to just work, send plain text. It's not a "personal preference." It's the only form of email that just works, for better or for worse. That's a simple, empirical fact.
But in any case, feel free to use and advocate the use of plain text e-mail/web as much as you want. It's your choice. However, if other "various implementations built on top of basic e-mail" are causing you problems, there is clearly a solution: get them to send you basic plain text!
In the first place, this is needless complexity. Email can just work, so it should just work. More to your point, however, most people don't even understand what the problem is. In one of the cases where I saved the day by using plain text email, the person trying to send data came to me for help because he thought Outlook was sending plain text - after all, that's what he'd pasted in, and he hadn't added any formatting. The second time, he made it look like plain text by changing the font to Courier, which (needless to say) didn't work. This is not Joe Sixpack, either, it's a statistician who is quite fluent with a number of sophisticated pieces of software. Outlook needlessly complicates the problem, and buries the nature and source of the complexity to boot. This is not my problem, nor is it the problem of the researcher on the other end, receiving email on an old machine. It's a problem of Outlook's design, and one that Outlook punts the user with no guidance, nor any hint that there's a problem at all.
Furthermore, do you honestly expect people to go to the trouble of resetting Outlook in order to send me an email, and then setting it back? I can tell you from experience: Doesn't happen. I'd be surprised if most of the people who send me rich text even know how to, and I couldn't blame the rest for not digging around in preferences (or is it options? settings? hmmm) just to please one guy. I note that MS' monopoly is mostly built on the fact that people don't like going to extra trouble, but they don't mind if they make someone else go to extra trouble ("You can't read my paper? Dude, upgrade already!").
Then there are the people who send me HTML email because that's the only option (in the case of one person with a webmail account).