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Use plaintext email

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Re: Use plaintext email

#281

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

u801e wrote: post #147
ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

> Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being able to use color, or bold, or italics, makes a difference in communication. Yet, you cannot do any of that on HN (other than a limited case like italic ). But, we can communicate just fine without those features. I suppose it's really a difference of a read once message versus having a discussion. In a read once message, you can format it like you describe. That's…

Format is a kind of moderation and guidance. With email, anything goes, but it's usually direct communication, where the rules are organically decided between the participants. With a zillion participants, that can't happen, so limiting the options is useful.

Re: Use plaintext email

#282

Post by u801e »

esoterica wrote: post #264
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't help but notice that your ad hominem attack was conducted entirely in plain text.

It was not. The HN page contains html. Notice how the comments are in a different font and color from the metadata above each comment? Notice how that improves readability?

Downvoted comments are less readable due to decreased contrast (though I assume that's intentional so people well skip over them instead of responding).

Re: Use plaintext email

#283

Post by gowld »

zepolen wrote: post #157
neuronic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communicating just fine is not the same as communicating at optimum. In the analog world, you could just hand over a white, plaintext birthday card. Or you could give one with a motive, color, some doodles and maybe a memorable photograph attached. Which one is more memorable? "It's used by marketing." is not an arguments against it. We have sophisticated spam filters. Update your rules then.

Go and visit a forum where embedded images are allowed and tell me that there is any sort of "optimum" discussion over there. In the end what happens is people use text overlays in the IMAGES in order to reply to each other. Since you edited your response to mention the birthday card: Yea - on the one hand you can leave a boring "Happy Birthday" message with lots of glitter to make it memorable. Or you can make the m…

Rebuttal: Yahoo! Answers is text only.

It's not text or images that make forum content good or bad or memorable. It's good people doing good work. And different people work well in different media. Saying that text is the only legitimate form of media is both ignorant and disrespectful.

Re: Use plaintext email

#284

Post by gowld »

athenot wrote: post #205
zepolen wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go and visit a forum where embedded images are allowed and tell me that there is any sort of "optimum" discussion over there. In the end what happens is people use text overlays in the IMAGES in order to reply to each other. Since you edited your response to mention the birthday card: Yea - on the one hand you can leave a boring "Happy Birthday" message with lots of glitter to make it memorable. Or you can make the m…

Some forums actually work a lot better WITH embedded images. To pick just one example[1]: a lawn forum where people will try to ask a question, or share an experience, and go back and forth trying to describe the details. A photo cuts that pain out and enriches the conversation. [1] https://thelawnforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=11802

That's a great example because besides the excellent use of pictures, it features terrible use of text -- the subject is "Going reel low"

Re: Use plaintext email

#285

Post by kgwxd »

jgtrosh wrote: post #143
kgwxd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true and yet the search tools supplied with these knowledge bases are terribly inadequate. Is there a better, standalone tool out there for turning email archives, from multiple sources, into a usable database with a powerful query language?

Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but you could use notmuch[0]. Haven't used it a lot, but I think it can import an mbox? Maybe you can merge multiple mboxes together? [0]: https://notmuchmail.org

I looked into that a few times, just haven't had the patience to get through the setup process. Maybe I'll get it done this time. There goes my afternoon :)

Re: Use plaintext email

#286

Post by gowld »

adtac wrote: post #223
snowwrestler wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, in fact here's a good example of someone using color to improve their communication: https://useplaintext.email/

>"But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" >This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.

I suspect you are being downvoted because people don't realize you are quoting the document. It's a shame that HN features articles that are written in a style that doesn't follow the basic standards of civility and quality that is expected of comments.

Re: Use plaintext email

#287

Post by u801e »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #258
u801e wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comments can't have tables, so you almost never see any actually tabular data like statistics. I frequently see people misstating copied across data, or getting confused by things that would be simple in a table. It can be done in plain text, but I don't commonly see it. For example: Column 1 Column 2 first second third fourth > Quoting from the article is very difficult, as laws and guidance often use formatting d…

The OP's point is that it might be better if HN allowed slightly more formatting than it does. Personally, while I wouldn't want full-bore HTML, I'd like to see a more substantial subset of Markdown[1] supported. Your own examples of tables, lists, and block quotes would look a lot better if they were, you know, actual tables, lists, and block quotes. [1]: Markdown isn't perfect, but it's pretty well-known, and by de…

> Your own examples of tables, lists, and block quotes would look a lot better if they were, you know, actual tables, lists, and block quotes.

I would agree with what you said about tables (which, in my experience, is an uncommon use case), but the rest can easily be rendered in plain text. Block quotes, in particular, could be done by indenting the text by several spaces (or a tab), just like it's done on HN.

Re: Use plaintext email

#288

Post by holy_city »

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #9
jve wrote: post #8

> Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like asterisks , /slashes/, _underscores_, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. Well, why bother writing his own post in rich text then? He has headings, bold, links, grey font at the bottom, image. Don't…

The page footer might interest you. It directly answers your question. Quoting "But if plaintext is so good, why is this page written in HTML?" This is a reference document, not an email, you twit.

Am I crazy for using email to send memos? Those serve as reference documents too, while creating a papertrail.

Re: Use plaintext email

#289

Post by gowld »

robenkleene wrote: post #50
jve wrote: post #8

> Rich text features desirable for end users include things like inline images, bold or italicized text, and so on. However, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Images can simply be attached to your email, and you can employ things like asterisks , /slashes/, _underscores_, or UPPERCASE for emphasis. Well, why bother writing his own post in rich text then? He has headings, bold, links, grey font at the bottom, image. Don't…

Email is supposed to be easy to quote, just like you’ve used a block quote in your comment. I assume it’s obvious that rich text is difficult to quote, but a quick explanation is that the invisible formatting characters used to represent rich text behave inconsistently when re-contextualized for a quote.

HTML has a hierarchical structure.

quoted content

It's far better than trying to keep count of how many ">" are in play, and deal with the vagaries of soft linebreaks and hard linebreaks and wrapping of plaintext.

Re: Use plaintext email

#290

Post by edgarvaldes »

ubermonkey wrote: post #124

My god, this is never going to die, is it? I mean, I get it. There are some things about plaintext that are nice, or that really appeal to the kind of people who read HN. I used to have arguments about this, too -- but it was 20 years ago. Today, the ship has fucking SAILED. And you know what? It's GREAT. I send formatted email constantly -- and they're better for it. Being able to embed screenshots is awesome. Being…

Agreed. I just hate the backgrounds some people put in email. In those cases I swicth to plain text in the response.
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