Well Dan should be on the trail back to the Bay Area today so I thought I would post something we disagree on and he can respond to and crush, while munching his Saturday morning bagel.
Why would you not want greater fidelity of thought in the most ubiquitous form of electronic communication?? Sure there can be abuse of pretty pictures and formatting but I could *grin* emoticon you to death with plain text :) ..... I have even seen people invent their own text tags I.E.
And my thinking is that a markup language doesn't need to be used but it's there if you want it. Flutterby is a great example of restraint and HTML, although I am still trying to talk Dan into embedding small pictures on the main page. To be honest I don't know where the base technology of Email should stop (if at all). Now that I am just starting to think XML is cool, I want that in my Email too. I think mail clients should support these technologies. I think the resistance I feel from my friends comes from the development side of things as this ups the ante to write a mail client quite a bit. I find it interesting that quite a few tech savvy people find Email that embeds HTML distasteful....perhaps the cutesy factor?? I think that's more of a user issue than technology one.......
-T
Friday, August 13th, 1999 todd@notreality.com