HTML in Email
I have long held in contempt those who, whether through ignorance or malice, allow their email to be blighted by inline html. You've all been subjected to these horrible messages — they arrive in odd, garish colors in those tiny, variable-spaced typefaces Microsoft and AOL decided looked good in 1998 — and god help you if you actually try to read the thing as raw source.
"What rubes," I think as I squint to skim their unreadable text. "Don't they know that only complete newbies and lazy assholes send HTML in their email?"
Whenever I get an email like this, I immediately write off the sender as either too clueless or too much of a dipshit to take seriously. It's one thing to get this garbage from your grandmother — it's quite another to get it from someone who pretends to be even moderately technically literate.
So it was with some surprise, and not a small amount of shame, today that I noticed I've been littering some of my outgoing email with html attachments for nine months, ever since I bought my current computer. My sincere apologies to all who have had to deal with this effluvia. Sometimes we look down on the unwashed masses and discover that they are us.
Of course, I can still look down upon those silly people who don't take the time to compose a three or four word subject line...