Going GUI...er

Grant Edwards grant.b.edwards at gmail.com
Sat May 2 16:16:45 UTC 2020


On 2020-05-02, Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 06:57:14PM +0100, Sam Kuper wrote:

>> Moreover, you appear to be committing the logical fallacy called
>> "argumentum ad populum" (aka "majoritarianism").
>
> No, because accepted practice is determined by the majority (in this
> case overwhelmingly so), so it's actually the point, not a logic
> fallacy.

Indeed. E-mail is like a language. It's defined by everyday usage. To
claim that you get to define what's "proper usage", when 99% of the
other users disagree with you would make Humpty-Dumpyty pround.

I would prefer that everybody in the world used e-mail clients that
could handle plaintext.  But they don't.  _Nobody_ I work with uses an
email client that properly displays plaintext as sent by mutt.  For a
while, I used muttdown to generage mixed/alternatve plaintext and
html.  That worked very nicely.  Now "they" have shut off the Exchange
SMTP/IMAP services, so I had to switch to hiri/OWA.  [I still write
much of my e-mail in markdown and paste the result into hiri/OWA.]

Most of my family and friends do almost all of their e-mail on phones.
Plaintext is very hard to read on small screans because it doesn't
re-flow to fit the screen width. Forcing people to read plaintext on
small screens is, IMO, inconsiderate.

Insisting that the world switch from HTML to plaintext for e-mail is
just tilting at a windmill.

--
Grant








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