Re[6]: [tied] Re: Short and long vowels

At 13:32:19 on Tuesday, 19 July 2005, Patrick Ryan wrote:

>>>> Could you please refrain from attaching fancy emoticons
>>>> that add several kilobytes to your post, as this one
>>>> did? Some of us read these posts over a dial-up
>>>> connection, and you're already posting in an
>>>> inefficient format. (E.g., the post to which I'm
>>>> replying was three times as long as the same post would
>>>> have been in plain text.) Thank you.

>>> What is "inefficient" about the format?

>> I already told you: your posts are unnecessarily bloated.
>> The problem is that you're posting in HTML.  As a result,
>> the message to which I'm responding actually consumed
>> 3784 bytes (excluding headers but including the crap
>> added by Yahoo), while the same message in plain text is
>> about 1700 bytes.

>> Incidentally, whatever program you're using also fails to
>> quote correctly.

>> Patrick:

> I prefer HTML.

And I consider it a very bad idea in e-mail. (See, e.g.,
<http://www.efn.no/html-bad.html>,
<http://www.nonhtmlmail.org/campaign.html>, and
<http://www.georgedillon.com/web/html_email_is_evil.shtml>.)
I set my mail reader to display only in plain text, so I
never see any fancy HTML effects anyway, unless I make a
special effort.

> Perhaps you should get a larger HD; 2084 bytes is not much
> these days.

Perhaps you should read what I said. My stated objection
has nothing to do with the size of my hard drive, but with
the extra time required to download the bloat: it's quite
noticeable over a 56K dial-up connection. For that matter,
the bloat noticeably increases the time consumed by
anti-virus software.

> What did you mean about "quote correctly"?

A properly functioning mail program adds a layer of
indentation, usually indicated by '>' and sometimes by '|',
'+', or the like, to quoted material. The only reason that
this post has correct indentation throughout is that I take
the trouble -- and it's a pain in the arse -- to fix it
manually when I respond to you. The program that you're
using is either improperly configured or simply broken.

Brian