Re: The Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard

> I would like to ask the list a few questions about subject: is it important,
> does it have any following or support from the accessibility community, are
> there alternatives, the status of the project, etc.: The Text Email
> Newsletter (TEN) Standard.
> 
> The homepage of subject: http://www.headstar.com/ten/
> 

It's called a "Standard" but doesn't seem to have any endorsement by any
standard body. This leads me to suspect that the word "standard" is being used
in the marketing-department sense of the word, which is a Bad Thing. It quite
clearly isn't a standard, for a start it talks about periodically updating and
improving the "standard" as if you could do that with a published standard.

Examining a few of the points:

1. This makes it impossible to write in any known language. In English you could
get by if you avoided certain words (naïve, façade, résumé) but you'd be hard
pressed to get by in many other language for more than half a sentence and in
many others for a single character.

3. Has problems with users receiving a newsletter and not remembering
subscribing to it and deciding it's probably Spam.

15. Goes completely against appendix E of RFC 2396 (which is something that may
become a real standard some day) without explaining why. I've seen the
practical issues addressed in debates as to whether you should put an extra
space before the >, but not as advice that you should just leave them out.
Really this should have something to back it up.

-- 
Jon Hanna
<http://www.hackcraft.net/>
"…it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for
equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people." - jargon.txt

Received on Monday, 5 April 2004 05:27:09 UTC