[pmmail-list] Presentation of quoting

[Kenneth Porter]

On Tue, 16 Oct 2001 04:57:27 -0400 (EDT), Gregory L. Marx wrote:

>To me, it's very much visually distracting ... I have no trouble following who says what using the existing ">" symbol for previous 
>postings within a thread ...

Agreed. What we really need is a "reformat and fill" for quoted lines
to fix stuff like the above quote before PMMail tries to word-wrap it.

>Personally (and I know I'll get flamed for this suggestion) I'd rather see RTF supported so each respondant would show up as a 
>different color within a message ... I find that easier to follow ...

Disagree. RTF, like HTML, should be limited to attachments intended for
offline presentation. Formatting discourages content from most people.
They get caught up in multi-font multi-colored content-free text.

A better solution would be to use a uniform quoting style (ie. a simple
">" as used in newsgroup readers) and color-code in the client based on
nesting level. This puts presentation of the quoting under the control
of the reader instead of the writer.

Think about people with vision problems like color blindness, glaucoma,
or total blindness (requiring screen readers). (I hate web pages with
hard-coded font sizes, as I have several vision-impaired people to
support and they can't read those tiny fonts, even on a really big
screen. One can't tell green from brown due to retinal damage, so I'm
also painfully aware of color issues.)

I really want to see PMMail let me always view the text/plain view of a
message containing HTML, without having to select Window | View Full
Message. This is perhaps best selected as a global option, a ranked
list of displayable MIME types (which allows future expansion to
provide RTF presentation for those who want it). I can't remember
receiving a message where I actually wanted to see the HTML view.

Ken
mailto:shiva@well.com
http://www.sewingwitch.com/ken/
[If answering a mailing list posting, please don't cc me your reply. I'll take my answer on the list.]



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