Re: Text email newsletter standard

Mike,

The markings in the news letter standard are also important to note.  They 
aid in skimming through the news letter much as header skimming aids in a 
well formatted html document or paragraph skimming or page skimming for that 
matter in other media.  It may be psudo structure, but it feels like 
structure to me and whether or not to call it a standard is something I 
won't argue, but It is a practice that has been developped through a lot of 
work and I have seen its evolution in various forms for a number of yeras 
now.  It would be nice to see something like this adopted uniformly across 
the email news letter discenination milu but then there are some news 
letters which may not lend themselves to this format.  I have seen a bunch 
of formats though and have to figure out what is being attempted by each one 
if there is one so having a uniform approach would make that process 
simpler.


Johnnie Apple Seed

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike Brown" <mike@signify.co.nz>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 7:30 PM
Subject: Re: Text email newsletter standard



Thank you for all the feedback on this.

The picture I'm getting is something like this:

- Plain text email is an unstructured medium
- Newsletters are an example of a document where structure is important
- At least some people (Matthew notwithstanding :) want to receive
newsletters via email
- Whilst the structure of the newsletter can be shown with HTML, it is
always a good thing to provide a plain text version

So, is the attempt by the text email newsletter standard to provide what
Patrick called "pseudo-structural information" something that is useful
or beneficial?

Personally I'm not so conecerned about them calling it a "standard" when
it clearly isn't. If it helps promote something which is a good thing,
then that can surely be forgiven!

Aside from the "pseudo-structural" sutff in the standard, a lot of it
seemed to me to be good practice, but not necessarily something writing
a newsletter would think about. For example, spelling out things rather
than using symbols, putting the name number and date of the newsletter
first, having a contents section at the top etc

Thanks again.

Mike

Received on Thursday, 9 December 2004 00:47:49 UTC