[ros-dev][OT] Mail format (was: PPC arch.?)

Quandary ai2097 at yahoo.com
Sat Jun 4 14:45:19 CEST 2005


Irony is a bitter mistress. Vim line-wrapped me at 72
characters, whereas Yahoo wraps at 54. I very recently
started to use sendymail, which pipes my text through
the Yahoo web interface, and quite obviously doesn't
run things through fmt before-hand -- hence the nasty
line filling. As such, I've decided to practice what I
preach, and reformat my letter.

I wish I could say it was intentional (the end result
was just too perfect in illustrating the point), but
it was an honest mistake.

Cheers.

-- Travis

On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 12:29:45PM -0700, Quandary
wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 04, 2005 at 12:03:48PM -0500, Rick
> Langschultz wrote:
> > 
> > I use Outlook XP to compose mail to my boss and
> > to a support team. I have to use HTML formatting
> > in my mail messages. Sorry for the inconvenience
> > I have caused. If people want to get picky about
> > the mail format and not the content of the
> > message, they should re-evaluate their purposes
> > involved in developing code, and material for
> > computers.
> 
> If you've ever tried to read an XML/HTML message in
> a plain-text reader (such as mutt, which is my
> client of choice), you would understand why folks
> complain.
> 
> To draw an analogy as to how silly your claim is
> (that the formatting should be ignored completely),
> consider the following scenarios:
> 
> 1. A huge C program that works, but has no comments
>    and obfuscated code.
>    "If you can't understand it without comments,
>     you should re-evaluate your programming 
>     ability."
> 
> 2. A patch that has thousands of formatting changes
>    intermixed with bugfixes.
>    "If you can't appreciate the functionality of a
>     freely offered patch that seems to fix a bug,
>     you should re-evaluate your stance as a 
>     community-based project."
> 
> 3. Documentation provided in rendered PS (or
>    another opaque format).
>    "If you can't appreciate the accuracy and user-
>     friendliness of the documentation, you should
>     re-evaluate your position on having a well-
>     documented system."
> 
> 
> See, these are all silly. It's easy for one side to
> just ignore the other -- yes, you may need whatever
> formatting HTML provides you for work
> correspondence; it's easy for you to forget that
> it's even there. Likewise, it's easy for those of
> us who edit and send raw text to ignore how
> engrained HTML can be in some mail front-ends. But
> at the end of the day, the lowest common
> denominator is plain-text -- and that's something
> folks will expect you to conform to.
> 
> Just like a patch with a thousand formatting
> changes, now matter how many bugs it fixes, it will
> be rejected. So to with your mails -- no matter how
> good the merit is, if we have to mind-parse the
> gibberish, it's just going to be outright rejected.
> 
> 
> Thanks for understanding,
> 
> 
> -- Travis
> 
> 
> 
> > Rick Langschultz wrote:
> > 
> > > <html xmlns:o=
> > > 3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"=
> > > xmlns:w=
> > > 3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"=
> > > xmlns=3D"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
> > 
> > [lots and lots of useless XML tags mixed in an
> > unholy cesspool with HTTP snipped]
> > 
> > Could you please trim that crap? I am, as I hope
> > the majority of list subscribers are too, not
> > especially interested in that you wrote an e-mail
> > in MSWord and that your "SpellingState" is
> > "Clean".
> > 
> > Please use plain-text only.
> > 
> > Thank you for your cooperation.
> > 
> > /Mike
> > 


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com 


More information about the Ros-dev mailing list