On 2 Sep 2025 16:38, Vinnie Falco wrote:
On Sat, Aug 30, 2025 at 7:42 AM Andrey Semashev via Boost <boost@lists.boost.org <mailto:boost@lists.boost.org>> wrote:
Plain text is the only sustainable format for long-term online communication
Rich‑text (Markdown/HTML) makes C++ mailing‑list discussions clearer than plain text. It preserves code exactly (indentation, tabs, long lines), highlights identifiers, and avoids smart‑quote breakage. Structured text—headings, lists, steps—lets people skim proposals; diagrams and benchmark figures remove guesswork; quoting exact lines stays stable. Archives become searchable documents and are easier for screen readers. There’s no downside: send multipart/alternative with a clean plaintext sibling and a sanitized HTML version; block remote images; keep patches in plain text; publish a tiny style guide. Result: fewer misunderstandings, faster reviews, better archives. We don’t allow undefined behavior in code; let’s avoid undefined meaning in email. And no Comic Sans.
And by the way, to reinforce my point, this message from you was encoded in multipart, and it looked drastically different in my email client (Thunderbird) from the other correspondence, on this list or elsewhere. Specifically, it was rendered using a different (proportional) and smaller font from the other messages, and it used a different line length. This made reading the message more difficult than necessary.