Re: comments on 'private use' section of proposal - Sanity check

On 07/19/2010 09:51 AM, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>>
>> It seems the only additional case covered by the private communication
>> exception is hand-authored HTML sent as email. While I won't claim
>> this never happens, I would guess it is extremely rare, and perhaps
>> such a narrow use case does not need special handling. (There is also
>> the possibility of non-email hand-authored HTML documents being
>> exchanged with a known fixed audience, but this too seems like a very
>> rare scenario.)
>
> Actually, I exchange hand-authored HTML all the time. For example, I
> write slides in HTML, and then present them to an audience to whom I
> don't actually give a copy of the slides. So I know that the
> presentation of the slides is the only time anyone will interact with them.
>
> Equally, I write content for a small audience - HTML is a rich document
> format, just like OpenOffice/Word etc, or PDF. Since I work on the
> format, and software for it, and since it is easy to create and easy to
> read anywhere, I find it natural to use it whenever plain text is
> insufficient. So I exchange documents all the time in hand-written HTML
> (as well as tool-generated HTML) with known audiences.
>
> But hand-authoring HTML email? I have never heard of someone doing that.
> I presume it is possible, but I don't know of any software that supports
> it and I don't know of anyone who uses /usr/ucb/mail and sends HTML
> mail, or writes their email in HTML by hand and uses a custom tool to
> push it to an SMTP server. I seriously doubt that such people exist in
> triple-digit numbers, to be honest.

There are plenty of people (certainly greater than triple digits) which 
create templates and simple scripts which fill in those templates and 
send the results as email.

I happen to be co-author of a book on Ruby on Rails, and have devoted an 
entire chapter to processing email.  Sending HTML formatted email, 
produced by templates, is very common in Ruby on Rails application.

I don't see any reason to believe that people who hand author templates 
will be any more conscientious or capable than people who hand author 
slides.

- Sam Ruby

Received on Monday, 19 July 2010 14:51:52 UTC