NEWS FLASH!

[Ralph Cohen]

On Sat, 16 Sep 2000 06:49:08 -0300, Trevor Smith wrote:

>On Fri, 15 Sep 2000 17:07:03 -0400 (EDT), Ralph Cohen wrote:
>
>>this list can argue back and forth about the impossibility and
>>irresponsibility of incorporating HTML into email because of a "lack of
>>standards" or desirability, but that completely ignores the fact that a
>>de facto standard has already been created by MS.  Where the front 90%
>>of the trains goes, the rest is sure to follow.
>
>OK fine. But you still haven't solved the issue of how much is enough
>_for everyone_ and how to get it "close enough" to Microsoft's
>rendering to be acceptable. After all, if the front 90% of the train
>is all red and blue and flashing with upper bar/viewing cars, etc.
>and the last 10% is a dirty gray coal car...
>

Not being able to determine "how much is enough _for everyone_" should
not be an excuse to do nothing at all.  In retail sales, a general rule
of thumb is that 20% of the products generate 80% of the sales.  In
other words, there is a relatively small core of products that will
meet the needs of the vast majority of the customers.  I believe that
the same thing can be said for HTML support for reading email.  There
is likely a very small core of tags that if supported, would meet the
needs of most of the users, such as line breaks, paragraphs, center,
bold, headlines, inline tags and simple tables.  Colors generally don't
matter although it's nice to have links highlighted.


>So what does BSW do? Struggle to implement _exactly_ the same HTML
>stuff as Microsoft? How much time/money should they spend getting as
>close to exactly the same as MS?
>

No.  I find PMMail 2k's HTML support adequate for the HTML email I
receive, and since I've never seen a single complaint about it's level
of support on this list, I can only assume that other people feel the
same way.  It's not the number of tags that are supported, it just
about supporting the right tags.  If someone receives a complex HTML
document to view, then that's what browsers are for.  Not having _any_
HTML capability, however, is likely a surefire way to have PMMail
summarily excluded from corporate checklists regardless of the other
features.  And, not having _any_ HTML capability in PMMail/2, limits
its usefulness a little bit now, but undoubtedly even more so in the
future.

Ralph

rpcohen@neurotron.com