[geeks] Anti-html Letter

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, February 20, 2002 at 16:00:13 (-0500), Mike Nicewonger wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Anti-html Letter
>
> on 2/20/02 2:55 PM, Greg A. Woods at woods at weird.com wrote:
> 
> > [ On Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 15:51:22 (-0800), Ron Rosson wrote: ]
> >> Subject: [geeks] Anti-html Letter
> >> 
> >> Has anyone put together any verbiage on why not to send e-mail
> >> formatted in HTML. Looking for one.
> > 
> > I just say it in one sentence:
> > 
> > Please DO NOT EVER post HTML-formatted e-mail to public mailling
> > lists, or to me personally.
> 
> While I agree with your responce and often respond the same way I them end
> up having to explain to the clueless $LUSER why this is so. I too would like
> to see a to the point explaination other than it is just plain wring and non
> standards compliant.

HTML is (or at least may be) a security threat when it is used within an
e-mail message, even with relatively safely implemented parsers like w3
in emacs.  There have been many (hundreds? thousands?) of related
postings on BUGTRAQ and similar forums.  HTML in e-mail is EVIL!

Even worse many people read e-mail with tools that can only show plain
text, and forcing a human to parse HTML just to read the content of an
e-mail message is downright cruel and unusual punishment!

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>