[Am-info] Microslop - beauty and elegance -- &nbsp

[Erick Andrews]

On Sun, 15 Feb 2004 11:42:12 -0500, Gene Gaines wrote:

>This morning I received an email from a senior technology
>manager employed by a U.S. company, located in the Washington
>DC area.
>
>He intended to send me an empty email, as the subject was all
>that was required -- two words, 11 characters total including
>one space.  He sent that, and of course the text of the email
>included a bunch of characters in the header.  And also included
>a message body.
>
>Up-to-date kind of guy, with what he considers to be elegant
>computer and software. Below is the body of the email he sent
>me. A quick count give me 2,394 characters in the message body
>-- all to send me a "&nbsp" which some call a nonbreaking space,
>a really stupid way to describe an empty message.
>
>Just an example.
>
>Gene Gaines
<snip the HTML>

Not sure who started this wasteful trend...maybe Netscape
by bundling an e-mail client into their HTML reader (browser),
but Windows users sure have popularized it.

E-mail should be simply human readable.  I think it's extremely
inconsiderate of people to send e-mail in HTML.  So much
so that I filter such stuff right to the bit bucket...which has the
added advantage of deleting most SPAM.  I would argue that
e-mail messages in HTML are spam.

If someone needs to send special characters (or some markup language)
beyond the national language ASCII code pages and character sets, 
ask first, or use MIME, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.  
That's what it was created for.

Erick Andrews