Accessing the BBC from outside the UK

[Andy Wedge]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Woodhouse [mailto:dwmw2 at infradead.org]
> Sent: 07 January 2012 13:20
> To: Andy Wedge
> Cc: get_iplayer
> Subject: RE: Accessing the BBC from outside the UK
> 
> 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

Well, I don't really agree with your readability theory as people clip email in different ways and it can make it difficult to understand the original context in which something is said. Whether an email is sent in plain text or HTML is really irrelevant if the sender can't be bothered to think about what they're sending.

Anyway, enough said on this, it's getting a bit off-topic for this group.

Andy