[ExI] plain text was Singularity Summit 2010: Just a Week Away!

[Mike Dougherty]

to answer your question:  html is the default for many email clients
these days.  In an effort to provide backwards compatibility for html
unavailable clients, the recommendation is to duplicate the text
portion of the html in a text-only section of the mime-encoded email.
You think the html is needlessly tacked on at the end but it is
actually the text-only portion that is prepended thoughtlessly to
honor an old recommendation for email compatibility.

I would like to ask what email reader and OS you are using.  Why does
it not have a feature to ignore the html parts of 'normal' emails?  My
gmail intelligently monitors an entire email thread and injects a
"show quotes" feature (which is collapsed from visibility by default)
This feature is not dependent on any particular quote character or
proper syntax requirement that would likely not be honored.  So I
wonder why the email reader that converts text to speech is not at
least as capable as the default threading controls for gmail.  It
seems your difficulty with what you believe is erroneously configured
email clients in the world would be common to TTS readers and that
should drive greater innovation in those tools.

per your request, I have top-posted against the general protocol of
email discussion lists to bottom post.  I also prefer people trim the
irrelevant parts of the quoted material; however, it seems the
threading features of email clients effectively hide the extraneous
noise so effectively that few people seem to mind the redundancy
anymore.

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Jim Stevenson <jims at eos.arc.nasa.gov> wrote:
> Hi.
> Is the attached html really of any use to those who read with speech?
> --
> Please answer in plain text, not mime attached html.
>
> Thanks much again as always.
> Jim
[trimmed]