HW: HTML e-mails

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On tis 20 apr 1999 20.01 -0400 "Andrew Apold" <mordru at FLITE.NET> wrote:
> At 06:41 PM 4/20/99 -0500, you wrote:
>>I use Outlook Express for sending mail.

<obligatory-MS-slagoff>

Ah! I think I see your problem ...

</obligatory-MS-slagoff>

;)

> when someone using a program that doesn't, they get all the tags and
> it's very jumbled and hard to read.
> After all, those
> extra tags make it look nice but take up more bandwidth, and are
> unecessary to get your point across.
> Anyways, it's up to you.  A good number of people can't or won't read
> what you say if you send it in html.

     Quite--the internet is full of fancy gimmicks that often
won't reach people with older machines and systems.  You'd be
surprised how many people--and institutions--are out there with
very old systems.  My machine is woefully obsolete by contemporary
standards, but still miles ahead of anything in my college's
computer lab (and that's at a pretty posh college at a pretty
posh university--pretty embarassing, really!).

     Generally, the closer you aim to the "lowest common
denominator" the more people you can actually communicate with.
My email client interprets HTML, but I generally junk anything
that comes in as HTML without looking at it.  Nothing personal,
it's just a means of filtering mail!  I generally avoid web
pages with lots of "toys" as well.
     It's the old "signal-to-noise" thing!

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
Dept. of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, & Celtic
St. John's College, University of Cambridge
mailto:cea20 at cus.cam.ac.uk
http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~carl/