In message <20000806103531.A9075@shell3.ba.best.com>
Tom Holub <doosh@best.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 06, 2000 at 01:59:17PM +0100, Matthew Hambley wrote:
> >
> > The reason I decided to go down the HTML->text route rather than the
> > text->HTML is that you are effectively loosing information when you
> > convert from HTML to text. Thus it is not possible to infer that
> > information on the return journey.
>
> At the risk of incurring the Wrath of Curmudgeons, this loss of information
> is why I decided to keep my FAQ's in HTML format only, and post them that
> way. If people want to lynx -dump them, let them remove the information
> themselves.
Now that I've made that statement in a public forum I'm beginning to suspect
it isn't entirely true. What you actually loose is *machine readable
information* which isn't quite the same thing. To the human reading the
document the information is still there it would just be a bugger to try and
machine parse the document for that information.
The way I see it is that the web is where HTML belongs and Use-net/e-mail is
where 7-bit ASCII belongs. People using a web browser don't really want to
deal with a big wodge of preformated text and people using a news/mail client
dont want to be confronted with a jungle of HTML mark up.
--
(\/)atthew Hambley ----------------\ If something's worth doing it's worth
\ doing badly until you can learn to
snowyowl@therealm.freeserve.co.uk \ do it well.
http://www.therealm.freeserve.co.uk/ \-----------------------------------
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