I did it! I did it! (was: Please, let me poke my eyes out...)

[John Thompson]

On Sat, 16 Sep 2000 08:12:56 -0400 (EDT), Gregory L. Marx wrote:

>Bingo !!!
>It bears repeating ...
>
>"It's all gaudy and big and stupid. Something with the same 
>strategy but more class or better design might be fun."
>
>Seriously Trevor you've nailed it ...
>IMO there's nothing wrong with eyecandy - providing it's done 
>PROPERLY ... with style and class ... And that's where the rub lies ... 
>What some people consider tasteful, others cringe at ... 

yes, and that's why you should implement the eye-candy at the client, not
in the message itself.  Perhaps have a library of effects for things like
sending and receiveing mail and so on and all the sender has to do is
select which effects to include with the message (maybe as just a few
encoded bytes in an X-header line) and the client will read and interpret
the sender's chosen effects in the manner the receiver wishes to enjoy
them...  If I turn off the effects I have a bog-standard text-only mail
client, but if I want to see every sentence in the message body that is
terminated with an exclamation point in bright-yellow flashing bold script
type on a purple background, well, hey, it's my client, right?


John (john.thompson@attglobal.net)