Re: Text email newsletter standard

Phill Jenkins wrote:

> You, I and even david.poehlman@handsontechnologeyes.com are sending and 
> receiving text emails just fine without any additional markup or 
> "standard".

In fairness, though, I haven't tried writing a document such as a 
newsletter, which may
require multiple levels of headings, as plain text. but only fairly 
linear single thoughts,
so to speak. For flat structures sure, you don't need anything other 
than a good
bit of line break before a new heading or topic...but what about the 
more complex
structures? Would you make them dependent on the number of line breaks 
preceding
the headings etc, at the risk that those won't be explicitly read out?

> If I did a quick comparison between the TEN standard and basic HTML, is 
> TEN really necessary?  Seems like just another markup scheme when 
> compared to the source view of HTML.  And by the way, why subject the 
> user to all that funny markup, why not just use the HTML browser to 
> remove it and just present the plain text?

If I were to listening to my emails being read out by a screenreader or 
other
text-to-speech technology, I'd personally find something like "plus 
plus" a lot
less annoying than "less than h two greater than" and the matching "less 
than
forward slash h two greater than" at the end. Also, I'd question why I 
was being
sent HTML when I only wanted a plain text version.

Again, I'm not saying TEN is the answer, but simply saying that we 
should just
stick with HTML or completely unstructured (safe for line breaks) plain 
text does
not really address the core problem of conveying multi-level structure 
adequately
in text only emails.

-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Wednesday, 8 December 2004 20:10:37 UTC