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I don't think it's hyperbolic. If someone has sent you an email in plain text with wrapped lines, your mail client will know this and it would be reasonable to
by wicket 6y ago
I don't think it's hyperbolic. If someone has sent you an email in plain text with wrapped lines, your mail client will know this and it would be reasonable to assume that perhaps the sender may be using a mail client not capable of rendering HTML emails nor autowrapping long lines. It would be a sensible choice to format the reply in the same format as that of the email received.
By stating "HTML email has features that most people actually want. The world has moved on...", you seem to be implying that the primary method of communication of Linux kernel developers is irrelevant and their use-case for email is not important. In fact, the more I think about this, this is a classic example of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
- mwcampbell 6y agoI think what we have here isn't a deliberate effort to extinguish a standard, but a clash between two different cultures. LKML follows traditional hacker norms, from the days of actual terminals and slow connections, whereas Outlook is built for the world of GUIs, WYSIWYG, and more or less high-speed connections. The latter is what the vast majority of people have chosen, so it's a sensible business decision for Microsoft to not pay much attention to the old ways. It's just unfortunate when those two worlds collide.
- wicket 6y agoI appreciate your sentiment, but I don't know, I'm not convinced. You can have all the GUIs and WYSIWYGs you want, but as I said, email replies should default to the same format as that of those received. Thunderbird (a modern email client) does this, if I recall correctly. It's very easy to avoid this mess.