Re: text/xhtml+xml vs. application/xhtml+xml

At 6:16 PM +0800 11/2/00, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
>On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, John Cowan wrote:

>  > Common practice for senders is to send mail in HTML, or both text and HTML.
>>  Common practice for receivers is to despise HTML mail; it is banned
>>  on most public mailing lists.
>
>The people in my office love HTML mail. They do not use public mailing
>lists. It may be inconvenient for technocrats, but HTML is popular.

But people whose mailer doesn't handle HTML mail get screwed--mail becomes
almost uninterpretable.  And visually handicapped people don't appreciate
having fonts and font sizes forced upon them.  Even I find that most people's
incoming HTML mail displays in a size too small to read, so I have to go
through the process of highlighting and resizing for every such message.
Occasionally I just trash them, and often I'm tempted to.

You should know your receiver before sending HTML mail.  If you don't know
that they can handle it easily, don't do it.  I doubt it's just the technocrats
running mailing lists that don't like the HTML; it's probably that they get
complaints from their users.  Who are people with hardware, software, or
visual restrictions that make HTML mail, like most accessibility-unfriendly
web sites, very much a pain in the neck or other part of the anatomy.
-- 
Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!

[email protected]