Re: Hurdles

[Janice Gelb <Janice -dot- Gelb -at- Sun -dot- COM>]

Christine Kent wrote:
> Bonnie and Janice, both of whom replied to me off list, I stand by what I
> said. If you want to take it on board as pointed at you, well... who am I to
> stop you?
> 
> It is sad when we no longer have any time left for human frailty, or any
> kindness in our souls, or any sense of give and take, or any humour, or any
> - well - humanity!  
> 
> ..and frankly, if you are so good at setting your email parameters so you
> can guarantee how a list and from there, each individual mail program will
> receive them, please post explicit instructions somewhere - they have eluded
> me for 20+ years.  It is my understanding that an email formatted as HTML
> may lose styles when received as plain text. If styles with line spacing are
> applied in the original, then they will be lost when formatting is lost.  I,
> too, cannot be bothered working out the rules for all the different lists.
> 
> I made this assumption when I saw the email.  Instead of griping at someone
> already under stress, I found reasons.
> 

I was trying to keep this off-list but if you're going
to post your arguments here, I suppose I should respond
here as well.

As I told you privately, my problem had nothing to do with
the original formatting of the message, or its content.
As you note, not everyone knows how to format email correctly,
and certainly I know I'm not going to agree with everything
everyone says on here.

My problem was with the response to the request to reformat
the message to increase the chances of the sender getting
useful responses and to make the original message less time-
consuming to read. Had the problem been that the sender did
not know how to do so, I would have had no problem with that
response ("Sorry, don't know how"). However, the attitude of
the sender's response ("I wish I had the time to do that...
but that's the way the cookie formats") struck me as the sender
not wanting to bother to spend her time fixing the message but
expecting the list members to spend their time trying to parse
it so they could send her back a useful response.

That perceived attitude is what prompted my response.

-- Janice

**********************************************************
Janice Gelb          | The only connection Sun has with
janice -dot- gelb -at- sun -dot- com  | this message is the return address

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