Re: HTML arrogance

J.P. ,

[Some attribution lines have been removed - not by me.]

The "missing" one was from Arlen.  Its inconsequential, and I could have 
removed the quoted part of his too.  It was just here to allow Chris to 
recognise what he was responding to in what I quoted of he said.

> The worst are ones where their _system_ is sending two-part emails, but 
> the
> person _sending_ them has no idea that that's what's happening, and is 
> unable
> to comprehend when you try to explain.

You are describing a run-of-the-mill user. :-)    To them computers and 
their software is rather magical.  And sometimes thats still is true for IT 
personell. :-(

My own memorable story was where I tried to help someone on a 'puter 
opposite of me, when DOS was still in use  :

"Whats in your screen"
"nothing"
"There should be /something/ there"
"No, nothing"

I walk a round to him, point to some text (an error message) at the bottom 
of his screen.

" and whats that than?"
"Yeah, exept for that"

And that guy was an aspiring sys-op.

> but one large company (I think it was FindMyPast, a genealogy company) had 
> such
> a system for their newsletters that was _broken_ - the plain text part 
> (which I was
> reading by default) was stuck at sending out the newsletter from one 
> particular issue

I think I read about that somewhere a few months ago.   It happens. Just as 
getting mail-merged (always advertisement) stuff where the personal parts 
are still showing as "{last_name}" and so on.

> of course, the people with whom I were corresponding had no idea, and
> claimed the error was at my end.

Some time ago my landline went dead.   A quick check of the line showed that 
it wasn't even powered (zero volts where about 70 volts should have been 
there).  When I asked our "ma bell" to come and repair it the first thing 
was to threathen me with having to pay for it when was my own doing*.  It 
turned out that when I dropped my ADSL (for a much cheaper cable) internet 
connection they, in the box on the street, just disconnected both ADSL as 
well as the phone line itself and forgot(?) to reconnect the phone ones

* Though knowing how users can point *anywhere* except for themselves when 
something "goes wrong" I can even understand that - though not why they kept 
at it when I showed I knew "just a little bit more" about phones than is 
common (70 volts when not in use isn't exact common knowledge).

Regards,
Rudy Wieser