Re: current/modern email netiquette: text/html bodyparts

Troy Piggins <usenet-0711@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't see how you can say they don't waste bandwidth compared
to plain text. Of course they do.

No, that is not necessarily true. It is true that a great many mail
agents which compose HTML emails do it in a very messy fashion, and
that they also create a duplicate plain text version, but if the HTML
is composed properly then there is no need for a large overhead, and
it could even be smaller than the plain text equivalent. The heart of
the matter is that "plain text" is bound to be smaller, but most
"plain text" is usually modified by the user to try to embed
additional non-textual meaning in there. For example:

To emphasise things in plain text, users often put underscores or
asterisks around them, like this: *...*. That adds two bytes, as
opposed to the seven bytes used in HTML for <b>...</b>, but if people
want to add emphasis over a longer block of text they might do
something like this:

* The quick brown fox
* jumps over the lazy
* dog

That has added six characters (asterisk plus space) and a couple of
line breaks, so as well as being more cumbersome to prepare and not
rescaling to page width properly, it is also now larger than the HTML
version would have been. A lot of people want to use bullet lists and
the four characters of the <li> tag sometimes gets replaced by five
characters or more (space space asterisk space space) in :

* Item 1
* Item 2
* Item 3

On a longer document, people often need to use headers and subheaders,
so we get things like:

I M P O R T A N T H E A D I N G

instead of <h1>Important Heading<h1>, (which also makes it much harder
for people using voice synth to understand) and we get things like

================
Sub Heading
================

instead of <h2>Sub Heading</h2>. In both cases the HTML version is
considerably smaller. If people decide to put lines between sections
of their document then they'll use a row of 60 dashes instead of a
simple <hr> tag in HTML, and if they decide to lay things out in
tables then I've seen people come up with things like this:

-------------------------------------------------------
Name | Age | Choice
------------------------------------------------------
Tom | 39 | Blue
*** | 19 | Red
Harry | 41 | Red
-------------------------------------------------------

I agree that HTML tables code is a bit clunky, but it is still more
bandwidth efficient than trying to lay out a table like that in "plain
text". It doesn't take much spacing out of columns before it becomes
bandwidth-cheaper to use HTML rather than ASCII artefacts to convey
formatting information.

So you can see that it is a fallacy to say HTML emails are always
bigger than the plain text equivalent, mainly because people very
rarely use truly plain text. Email editors written into Outlook etc
may not generate very good code, but that isn't the fault of HTML, its
the fault of the programmers who wrote those programs. For some of our
web-based apps we are sending reports out to the users and those
reports are well crafted HTML, contain tables of figures etc, and
these are well-crafted HTML, so not only are they more readable than a
plain text document, they are also considerably smaller.

For example, I know HTML is text as opposed to binary. But it is
not /plain/ text. Some MUAs may not be able to render html, and
if a message is sent as text/html only they see all the HTML
code.

This is an argument put forward by techies who claim to be speaking on
behalf of poor downtrodden users. It is not an argument put forward by
the users themselves. It is hard to find a user still using mail
software so old that it cannot make a decent stab at formatting HTML,
and if you do find one then they might appreciate it if you force
people to only send them plain text, but they'll appreciate it more if
you help them get onto more modern software. On the other hand, I know
a lot of users who like to view their mail in easy-to-read
proportionally spaced fonts, and for those users the so-called plain
text messages which include tabulations can be impossible to read
because none of the columns line up.
.