Boy is this getting ugly.<paranoid delusion> First of all, HTML in newsgroups is
Netscape's and Microsofts way of trying to "upgrade" the quality of newsgroups,
and also force everyone to use their products.</paranoid delusion> Their
marketing departments probably think that if people want to read a newsgroup bad
enough and that newsgroup has HTML posts, then they'll start using HTML savvy
news readers.

Hey, these are marketing people, what can I say.

I personally use Netscape to read this newsgroup becauseI like the feel of it. I
don't know anybody who likes it and they all use other programs to read news. I
don't like them. I've tried them. I was once concerned that I was posting
messages in HTML and then being ignored for it. I changed my preferences to
always send in text (and hopefully it's still doing it) because I know a lot of
people here don't have HTML savvy readers,and don't want them.

Newsgroups are for text. If people want HTML they'll set up a javascript
bulleten board for the world wide web.

Josh English
eng### [at] spiritonecom

Lue Ebra wrote:

> I've watched the flamewars regarding html usage, and frankly, I think it's
> getting ridiculous. Half of the threads I pull are flames about html, and
> half of those are in html. I understand that a lot of you run newsreaders
> that don't support html and some of you have to pay for each megabyte you
> download. probably the rest of you don't give a flying flip either way. That
> breaks us up into roughly three groups.
>  For the third group, good on you. You're more interested in the actual meat
> of the matter than the frills and frippery.
>  For the first group, A) Get a grip. Do you flame a webmaster because his
> Netscape 4 javascript blew a tire on your IE3.01 browser? Didn't think so.
> You usually just pick up and move on, gleaning the pertinent info and
> disregarding the rest (unless the error makes that impossible, of course).
> B) Get a better newsreader. While free may be good, getting that rinky-dinky
> 120K newsreader off the "Biggest Collection of Free Crap CD" that came with
> "Technoweenie" magazine (wait a minute.. I think I subscribe to that one..oh
> well) doesn't constitute a really smart move. You're not running Netscape
> 1.0, or mIRC 2.3, or POVray 1.0 so quit reading the news with something that
> went out with Windows 3.0. Upgrading isn't a sin, doesn't require a great
> deal of work (nor brains) and generally makes life a little easier. (Now
> watch, I'll get return flame from someone running Win 3.0 using the first
> release of Free Agent and Mosaic 1.0 on a 386sx16.)
> As for you Pay-Per-Byte ppl: get a real ISP, you're not even getting kissed.
> What possible advantage could they have? I've got unlimited access for
> $15/month for Lakshmi's sake. Even AOL's better than that (and ultimately
> cheaper). On a regular basis, I cycle through my Browser cache at a sitting
> (which is set at 300 MEGS). Can you imagine how much that would cost in a
> month? I can.. $15!
> Now that I've vented that, I'm expecting another 3 dozen posts in flame..
> the REAL drag to html postings. Funny.. a 2K html post generates 50K of
> flame (kinda like the fliers in the Sunday paper).
>
> --
> Lue Ebra
> "Only you can prevent forest fires" -Smokey the Bear
>
> PS: I posted this in plain text format for a reason.. so you wouldn't skip
> it just because it's html.

Post a reply to this message