On Fri, 2010-06-04 at 16:27 +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
For headings, it's simple to just underline them
Like that, see... And if it's not the same level heading...
Subheadings are fun too
What you are doing above is specifying exactly how the text is to be laid out and relying on the mail client not to join the two lines together of otherwise re-format them.
Elsewhere people have been saying plain text is better because e-mail should be about content rather than presentation.
The fact is there are "document concepts" that anyone who writes more than trivial documents, of which e-mail is a kind, expects to be able to use. These include things like:
* paragraphs (as opposed to lines) * headings * block-quotes * lists (ordered and unordered) * emphasis
People often use these concepts in plain text e-mail as I have done above with a list and as Brett has done with his headings in the message I quoted but the plain text only conveys that context by a crude attempt at affecting the presentation of the text to match a style of presentation normally associated with that document concept.
In HTML there are tags that correspond directly to those document concepts so had I written the above list in HTML I would have used the <ul> and <li> tags and the mail client would know it was a list and could then do whatever it wishes to present that as a list.
If I was designing a poster I would be concerned about which fonts and colours were being used and extactly how everything is laid out. In an e-mail I don't care about any of those things, I just want what I have written to be easily readable by the person who receives it and, if there is some structure to what I have written, that this is also discernible to the reader.
So it seems to me that HTML of itself is not the evil, rather it is programs used to compose e-mail then tempt people into working with concepts such as font families, point sizes, colour, bold and italic rather than the document concepts I mention above.
To answer Antony, lawyers have for years been writing in such as way as the particular sequence of words is unambiguous even without being able to immediately see the structure of the document but then they don't usually get plain English awards.