Accessing the BBC from outside the UK

[David Woodhouse]

On Sat, 2012-01-07 at 11:57 +0000, Andy Wedge wrote:
> I do find it somewhat ironic that though, that we discuss utilities
> that allow us to download gigabytes of audio & video in a style that
> dates back to the ark when a 9.6Kbps modem was considered blindingly
> quick.

The thing about top-posting and trimming your citations isn't really
about size; it's about readability.

Take a look at http://david.woodhou.se/mail-thread.html for example; it
shows how it *should* look. The top image shows the whole mailer window
with the folder index. For each mail, you can see *exactly* which mail
it's a reply to. And the rest of the images are just the individual
mails. In each one, you have *just* the right amount of context to
understand what the sender is saying. And no more.

Even the ban on HTML isn't about size. It's also about readability,
mostly. Imagine you're reading a book and every time you turn the page
you're confronted with a different font, different background colour and
image, and different page layout. That's going to make it hard to read,
isn't it? HTML mail can be just the same. It's a text-based medium, and
it's a whole lot easier to deal with if all the text looks the way
you've configured it to, to be optimal for *your* screen and *your*
eyes. Again, you can see this in the example I gave above. Switching
from one of those mails to the next, it *doesn't* take any time for your
brain to adjust to the new font and layout... because there *isn't* a
new font and layout.

Banning HTML also gets rid of most of the spam, too, which is nice.

There's another beneficial collateral effect: there's a huge correlation
between those who top-post and send HTML, and those who don't pay much
attention to what they're saying anyway. A lot of the ill-thought-out,
hard-to-understand and outright dim emails that you see are *also*
top-posted and HTML. I make no claim of causality; it's just a
correlation that I've observed.

-- 
dwmw2
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