Credits: matthew@mwinn.powernet.co.uk

( A MIME text / html part was included here. )

Please, please, please don't post HTML to Usenet. It causes my computer to dial out, and thus costs me money. Usenet is a TEXT medium. Save HTML for the Web. Thank you.

Fix your computer! The 4.0 generation of browsers options the formatting in HTML. Generation 5 will default to HTML!

Well, guess who just won this year's award for failing to get the point.

Did you somehow fail to understand the words "It causes my computer to dial out"? Whenever some idiot puts links in their message it makes offline readers try to reconnect to the network to resolve the links. For those of us who are charged for each phone call this can be expensive, so it's little wonder that most of us choose to ignore non-text/plain messages. It isn't that we can't read text/html, it's that we (a) don't want to pay to do so, and (b) choose not to for reasons of taste.

In general, the header line

Content-type: text/html

can be taken to mean roughly the same as the following:

Hi! My parents were siblings(1) so I have the intelligence of an earthworm. I have nothing of interest to say because I have more feet than brain cells and think that the internet consists of nothing more than the world wide web, but to compensate for the lack of content in my message I'm going to fill it with really kewl fonts and colors(2) to impress you.

I'm aware that document design is a difficult task requiring considerable experience but I'm just too amazing to care about that: I'll just pick HTML tags at random so each of my postings uses as many features as possible. After all, if <blink> didn't make my message look stylish and sophisticated it wouldn't have been added to the language, would it?

If you can't understand any of this that's too bad: you should squander your life's savings to upgrade your computer so it can run Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 so you can experience the full effect of my ramblings. I know you'd prefer me to post in text/plain format but I can't because then people might actually read my message and realise what a sorry little tosser I am.

(1) Sure, inbreeding is supposed to be bad for you, but at least I can count to 14 on my toes.

(2) American spelling, because most of these idiots come from America. More enlightened countries have changed their laws to permit abortion up to 30 years after conception in order to deal with these morons.