mailing list etiquette, again [was Marketing (was Re: Ubuntu's success)]

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2006-05-05 at 16:18 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Lee Revell wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 10:37 +1000, Cefiar wrote:
> >> it always irks me that you cannot tell Mailman to filter out HTML
> >> posts, or alternatively, strip all the HTML content, even if perhaps
> >> on a per-user basis (eg: each user could have a flag NOT to receive
> >> HTML mail). This would then make the HTML mail point null and void.
> >> 
> > 
> > I'm not sure if the problem is on the sender side or with the client's
> > rendering, but IMHO the only really irritating aspect of HTML mail is
> > that the text extends all the way across the window rather than wrapping
> > at a reasonable width like 80 columns.  Numerous usability studies have
> > found that having to scan all the way across the page increases eye
> > strain.  Newspapers have known this for at least 100 years - a long
> > article is separated into columns rather than being one huge block of
> > text.
> 
> Interesting - then my email reader should really display messages in
> multiple columns.  It may be easier not to have to scan so far, but it's
> also easier not to have half the available screen width left blank so that
> you have to keep paging down.

My eyes usually get tired long before my mouse hand ;-)

But yes, it would be best to use multiple columns.  It might surprise
some people who try to use HTML for WSIWYG typesetting, but that's not
what it's for anyway.

Lee