Re: HTML arrogance (was: Re: Tutorial: Notepad++ shortcuts.xml macro converts unicode to the 95-keyboard ASCII characters)

On Mon, 15 Dec 2025 10:07:30 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver"
<[email protected]> wrote:

>On 2025/12/15 8:56:53, R.Wieser wrote:
>> Take for instance the kid who *purposely* posted HTML-ed messages, with the 
>> text part of it replaced with a demand we use a HTML-capable newsgroup 
>> readers. Quite the bit of arrogant barf (since using ES I have not seen him 
>> anymore.  Likely ES has banned HTML posts for (text only) newsgroups like 
>> these ones).
>
>It's not just some "kid"; I've had companies that do same in emails.
>Some even just say something like "we have tried to contact you in
>words-and-pictures ..." in the plain-text part. 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. That's just about tolerable when it actually
>works, 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 was asking them why they
>were telling me about (e. g.) special offers that only had a few days to
>run, and eventually they were telling me about them after they'd expired
>(or events after they were over); of course, the people with whom I were
>corresponding had no idea, and claimed the error was at my end.

Most HTML-only emails are spam, or designed to look like spam. I
sometimes get emails from banks and the like formatted to look as much
like spam as possible, so I'm perpetually having to fish them out of
spam queues -- they use lazy HTML, and other spammers tricks like
one-pixel codes to let them know if you've read them.

My mail reader is setot read plain-text by default, and only to
display HTML if there isn't a plain-text version. But it will not
display "lazy HTML" -- ie parts of the message that are not part of
the message, but have to be fetched from a remote web site. It just
displays those as greyed-out blanks.

This might annoy the whizz-kid web designers, but email is not a web
page, and so far it has kept me safe from a lot of the malware that
uses all those tricks. 




-- 
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web:  http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk