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Re: HTML or XML



Bill wrote:
> BTW, AOL has about 26,000,000 members, and HTML (or XML) is going to become
> a major e-mail standard if not THE standard, so. . . . .

HTML will be supported by many email systems because you can control the
visual presentation by adding fancy fonts, precise positioning commands,
Javascript and graphics. None of those things are really suitable for a
discussion group which is gated to hundreds of folks who receive their
messages via modems over phone lines, its just too time consuming.

If you permitted HTML onto a mailing list, you could not prevent folks
transmitting all forms of silly signatures and graphics which would
either appear as a lot of gobbledie gook (typically how mailing list
software deals with markup code) or if supported, with all manner of
huge graphics files embedded. No thank you. I'd be forced to drop from
any such discussion group. There may be some types of mailing lists who
specialize in images or who are willing to have HTML in their messages
but they would be more narrowly focussed.

XML is a really broad category of markup but is not of its own a
standard for any type of specific information interchange such as email,
or documentation. Specific XML codings are used for that and the term
XML will probably be misappropriated for future emerging documentation
interchange standards for email. We have a lot of problems with the
utter diversity of such so-called standards on the world wide web. HTML
was intended to address a common, highly universal markup language; I
would prefer to see it used more than Java, java-script and XML but it
obviously won't do for real book like documentation. Perhaps the newer
HTML standards will do.

Sorry for the off topic posting but I hope this helps to explain the
need to filter out HTML posts.
-- 
Steve Pushak                              Vancouver, BC, CANADA 

Visit "Steve's Aquatic Page"      http://home.infinet.net/teban/
 for LOTS of pics, tips and links for aquatic gardening!!!